Brie Nicole Inked

All I have ever wanted was to belong. Not everywhere. Not loudly. Just once. Just to one person. A place disguised as a body. A home that could hold me without asking me to shrink. Arms that could quiet the screaming inside my chest, if only for a moment. I knew it was too much to ask—to make a person into a refuge—but when you have never had one, you learn to dream in extremes. You learn to reach for the impossible because the ordinary has never reached back.

I carry this hunger everywhere. It lives under my skin, in the hollow spaces where safety should have been. I crave belonging the way drowning lungs crave air—desperately, irrationally, without dignity. I tell myself maybe one day it will arrive unannounced, that home will walk into my life and recognize me. But how am I supposed to believe that, when belief has always been the first thing to betray me? When everything I touch eventually fractures, collapses, turns sharp in my hands?

My heart has been broken so many times it no longer remembers how to open. What remains is guarded, fragmented, barricaded behind walls I didn’t want to build but had to. Walls that rise instinctively, violently, the moment hope gets too close. Even when I try to lower them—when I dare to imagine safety—the walls snap back into place, higher than before. I am always taught the same lesson. I am always proven right.

Brick by brick, I fortify my loneliness. Layer by layer, I disappear behind it. I learn how to stand alone so well that it starts to feel permanent, inevitable, like a sentence already served in advance. Home becomes a word I don’t trust. Belonging becomes something that happens to other people, people who were easier to love, people who were enough. And so the truth settles in, heavy and quiet: maybe home was never meant for me. Maybe it was always just a fantasy—something imagined by a broken little girl who kept reaching for warmth and learned, over and over, that wanting does not make you chosen.