The Belonging Road

“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 like mine. The red dirt has a way of keeping you grounded and restless at the same time, a strange gravity that holds your body while your spirit paces the perimeter looking for an open door.

For months, I’ve been fighting the ache in my chest, the one that whispers, "this isn’t where your story ends." I used to think belonging was something you earned: a family name, a marriage that stayed, a house full of pictures that didn’t hurt to look at. But I’m starting to think it’s something softer, something you recognize when you finally stop forcing yourself to fit.

That’s what The Belonging Road is about.

It’s a pilgrimage of sorts. Not to find paradise or to collect stamps in a passport, but to trace the quiet map of humanity. What makes us feel at home, and what keeps us wandering. I’m leaving with more questions than answers: What does safety sound like in a new place? How do strangers become family? How does a nurse, a mother, a woman rebuilding herself learn to belong again? Not in the eyes of others, but in her own skin?

Maybe belonging isn’t about where you are, but how you arrive.

So, I’m starting here, in a small rental house that echoes too much when it rains, packing what’s left of my courage into a suitcase that’s seen better days. There’s a notebook beside my keys and a Polaroid camera I barely know how to use. My sidekick Mochi, is sleeping by the door sprawled out as if she already knows this is the last night we’ll spend under this roof.

Tomorrow, the road begins.

I don’t know where it will take me. Maybe north, toward the moss and mist of Oregon. Maybe somewhere far enough that the desert feels like a dream I once had. But I know this much: I’m going to listen... to places, to people, to the small wild pulse of life that keeps calling me back to myself.

This is the first step.

This is where the leaving and the returning share the same floor.

Welcome to The Belonging Road.