I got to my parents’ house last month and did the thing I always do now, which is nothing.
I put my bag down against the wall of my old room and left it there, zipped, for three days. I did not hang anything up. I did not take out the book I was reading or the charger or the small bag of things I always carry, as if some part of me was still deciding whether I was actually staying.
I used to unpack the moment I walked in, not because anyone told me to, but because the room was mine, and putting my things into it was just what you did with a place that belonged to you.
Now I mostly don’t bother. I live out of the suitcase in the room I grew up in, which is a strange sentence to have to write about your own childhood bedroom.
Nothing about the room has changed enough to explain it. Same shelf, same window, same particular creak in the door. The explanation, when I finally sat with it, was not in the room at all.
The souvenirs stopped having anywhere to go
There used to be a small ritual attached to coming home. I would bring something back from wherever I had been. Actually, more than just “something”: a ceramic cup, a postcard, some object that had no function except to prove I had been somewhere, local or just my favorite foods from a foreign supermarket, local coffee and plenty of teabags from the hotels or Airbnbs, just because, you never know. And I would find a spot for all of them. A shelf. A windowsill. Some corner of the room that would hold them from then on, so that walking past these things later would return me briefly to the place I bought it.
I’ve mostly stopped doing that. Not because I stopped travelling, and not because I stopped noticing things worth bringing home.
I stopped because I no longer know which home the object is supposed to belong to. My parents’ house doesn’t feel entirely like a place I’m adding to anymore. My apartment in Tbilisi doesn’t either, not in the same way, now that my sister lives there and the space that used to be fully mine has quietly become ours, or hers even.
I still have keys to both. I am welcome in both. Neither one is where I automatically imagine an object of mine sitting for the next ten years.
It is not really physical space I’m missing in either place. There is a spare shelf in my old room right now, and there would be room for a cup on it. What’s missing is the emotional space, the sense that something I choose to bring back has an obvious place to land and stay.
Places I’m allowed to sleep, and the one thing that’s different about them
I have somewhere to sleep almost everywhere I go now. That is not the same claim as having somewhere I return to.
I can describe the difference more easily than I can explain how it happened. A place I return to doesn’t need an explanation for why I’m there. A place I’m allowed to sleep does, even a small one, even just a version I tell myself. At my parents’ house, I am a guest who used to be a resident, which is its own quiet negotiation every time. At my apartment, I share the story of who was there first and how the space gets divided, which my sister and I do without conflict, mostly, but which still means I am not the only center of gravity in the rooms I once called entirely mine.
What’s odd is that this hasn’t made me want permanence more. If anything, I have become noticeably more comfortable with the opposite. Hostels. Airbnbs I booked two days in advance. A tent. A sleeping mat on a wooden floor somewhere I’d never been before that week. Grass, more than once, with nothing under me but a jacket. Bedrooms that belonged to people I’d known for less than a month sometimes.
None of those places have ever let me down the way home sometimes does now, and I think I understand why. A hostel bed never promised me anything. It doesn’t have a history I’m supposed to still fit inside. My childhood bedroom does, and that history is exactly what makes it possible for the room to disappoint you in a way a rented mattress never can.
What appeared instead of a house
Weeks before any of this, I was in Spain for a project, sitting outside with a small group, and one of the trainers asked us to close our eyes and picture somewhere that made us feel safe.
As a researcher, I have spent years studying how people become attached to places. I assumed, honestly, that this exercise would be easy for me. I expected home to arrive automatically, the way it always had when anyone had asked me a version of this question before.
It didn’t arrive.
What came instead wasn’t a place at all, not in any sense I could have described on a form. Grass under me. Birds somewhere I couldn’t see. Warmth on my skin that I want to call sunlight, though I couldn’t swear to it. A stillness that had nothing tense left in it.
And a hand holding mine.
There was no face attached to it, no voice, nothing that let me file it under a specific person the way you’d expect a memory to behave. It was simply there, warm and unremarkable, the way a hand is when you’ve stopped noticing you’re holding it.
Maybe safety had stopped being architectural for me somewhere along the way, and I only found out by accident, with my eyes closed, in a country that wasn’t mine.
What the research says, and what it doesn’t need to
Place attachment researchers have a name for the bond behind all of this, in a widely cited framework: the bonding that occurs between individuals and their meaningful environments. The same body of research is direct about what happens when that bond breaks: grief isn’t only about losing a person — it can also arrive after losing a place that mattered enough to hold you. That’s a clinical way of naming something that felt, from the inside, much smaller and quieter than grief. More like a suitcase I didn’t unpack.
My own research looks at something adjacent to this, the way people who move often, digital nomads especially, end up building a sense of place identity that isn’t tied to any single address.
I’m not a digital nomad. I have two addresses, not zero, and that’s part of what makes this harder to name. It would be simpler if I had no home at all. Instead I have two places that used to unambiguously hold that word, and neither one currently does, which is a much stranger position to explain to people than simply not having one.
Note: I’m a researcher, not a therapist, and I don’t think what I’m describing needs treating. But if any part of this sounds like more than a passing adjustment, if the sense of not belonging anywhere has started to feel heavier than an interesting discomfort, that’s worth mentioning to someone qualified to help carry it, not just writing about.
A safe place that doesn’t need an address
I keep turning the image over. Grass, birds, warmth, a hand. No walls in it anywhere. No street I could have named if you’d asked me to draw it.
I used to think safety needed four walls and a lock on the door, or at minimum, an address I’d lived at long enough to know its sounds by heart. I’m no longer sure that’s true, or at least I’m no longer sure it’s true for me right now, at this particular point in my life, with a suitcase still zipped against the wall of a room I grew up in.
Maybe I haven’t lost my attachment to places at all. Maybe I’ve just stopped expecting any single one of them to hold me the way they used to, and started noticing what was doing the holding instead.
For now, when I close my eyes and go looking for somewhere safe, I don’t see a house. I see grass, and I feel a hand I still can’t put a name to, and for whatever reason, that’s enough to make my whole body exhale.
