SaraEvery journey home is an amputation disguised as routine
I never leave a place intact. Somewhere between the goodbye and the first mile, something tears loose inside me, a strip of soul caught on invisible nails. I feel it dragging behind me, stretching thinner and thinner until it snaps without a sound. The world never notices. Cars keep moving. Birds keep singing. Someone laughs in the distance. Only I know I’ve left another living piece of myself behind.
The wound is never clean.
It hangs open beneath my ribs, wet and breathing, exposed to everything the world carries. Dust settles into it. Regret breeds in it. Every memory is another dirty fingertip pressed into raw flesh. I imagine invisible bacteria crawling through the opening, feeding on what should have remained sacred. They multiply in silence, turning longing into infection.
The body knows how to scar.
The soul does not.
Each return home is another invitation sent to darker things. I set the table with my grief, pour a glass for loneliness, and leave an empty chair for whatever has followed me back. Parasites need only an opening. Mine is generous. They slip into the wound with patient hunger, nesting in the places where hope used to sleep. They do not kill quickly. Predators do that. Parasites understand the art of keeping their host alive, just healthy enough to carry them from one departure to the next.
Home becomes less of a destination and more of a quarantine.
The walls recognize me, but I no longer recognize the person who arrives. Every return brings back someone slightly hollower than the last. I unpack my bags, but never recover what was left behind. Those forgotten fragments remain scattered across train stations, empty streets, borrowed rooms, and final embraces, haunting the geography like abandoned organs that still remember my name.
Sometimes I wonder if those pieces are still alive.
If they lie there bleeding beneath the surface of ordinary places, slowly rotting into something unrecognizable. If mold grows over my memories. If worms thread themselves through abandoned dreams. If strangers unknowingly walk across the graveyards of previous versions of me.
Perhaps that is why leaving hurts more each time.
There is less soul remaining to lose, yet each fragment has become more precious than the last.
One day I fear I will return home carrying only a body that remembers its owner. The parasites will have eaten everything else, and the wound, having never been allowed to heal, will simply become who I am—an open cavity wandering from place to place, mistaking movement for survival, and calling the slow consumption of the self “coming home.”
