A distant home calls me… and every whisper rips me open. Not gently. Not tenderly. It claws at my ribs, drags its fingers through my lungs, leaves my heartbeat raw.

I walk through this life, a shadow tracing streets that were never mine, speaking words that shatter before they land. I am exile incarnate, and the world does not care.

I remember things I should not, sights, smells, voices from a life I never lived. I carry them like stones in my chest, each one bruising me with every breath. Rain on cobblestones, smoke curling from unseen chimneys, laughter lingering just out of reach, every memory cuts me open, a wound that refuses to heal. I clutch at them and they vanish, leaving only cold, hollow air where my bones ache.

I want to go there. To fall into that home and finally stop trembling. But the path is smoke and glass. Every step forward breaks me, every heartbeat mocks me.

And even if I reach it, will it recognise me? Will it welcome a girl made of fragments, stitched together with longing and blood? Or will it vanish, leaving me bleeding in silence, alone with the echo of my own desire?

Sometimes I think of surrendering, letting the call fade, letting the emptiness take me whole. But it never fades. It coils in my spine, hums in my veins, waits in my lungs.

Every quiet hour, every shadow, every flicker of thought reminds me: I am tethered. Tethered to a home that will not open its doors. A home that waits, patient, merciless, hauntingly beautiful in its cruelty.

And I follow it. Always.

Through streets that are not mine, through steps that leave my feet bleeding, through nights that turn my heart into a whispering grave.

And it calls.

And I follow.

And I follow.

And I follow…

And still, it waits.