There comes a point in life when you realize that some wounds do not close in silence. They live in the spaces between words, in the things you never got to say, the people who never showed up, and the moments you had to survive alone. For years, I carried the weight of things that were never mine to hold. Grief that hollowed me out. Loneliness that settled in my bones. And a longing for a kind of mothering I would never know. I learned how to survive without comfort, how to

“Maybe home isn’t where you start or where you end up, but what you gather along the way.” The desert hums differently at night. Not peaceful, exactly...just quieter, as if the sand itself exhales when the sun finally stops burning holes through the horizon. The porch light flickers against the stucco, the air smells faintly of rain that never comes, and somewhere in the distance a dog barks like it’s guarding a secret. I’ve lived here my whole life and still, it’s never felt