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We stand here, in this middle way—never fully arriving, never fully leaving. Always wanting to be where we are not. Aiming for tomorrow, wishing for yesterday, as if somewhere else holds the answer we cannot seem to touch, as if time were a house
we could walk back into and rearrange.

And yet, this moment continues. It does not ask for permission. It does not wait for us to catch up. It simply unfolds, carrying pieces of what was into hints of what will be, while we drift somewhere in between.

I have no regrets. No regrets at all. Not because everything was right, but because everything belongs. Every step, even the uncertain ones, has already been absorbed into the shape of my life. There is nothing to return to, nothing to undo. Only this quiet acceptance that what happened… happened. And it is mine. And it is me.

Still, a thought lingers.

I wonder if they see me.
I wonder if they love me too.

To leave your home is to grow roots deeper. Distance does not loosen them—it pulls them, stretches them, until you can feel every thread. Nothing cuts the heart more than being away. Missing out, missing everything—the small things most of all. The ordinary moments that never thought to wait for you. My cousins first communion and my grandmas funeral.

You begin to measure life differently. Not in days, but in absences. In chairs left empty, in conversations that continued without your voice. Life goes on, as it should, and that is the quiet ache of it—you are both part of it and apart from it at the same time.

I wonder if they miss me. I wonder if they notice me too. Across media screens, through brief phone calls, in old photos held like proof, in memories that refuse to fade—I search for myself in their version of the story.

I wonder if they are proud of me. If the distance reads as courage or simply as leaving. If what I am building feels real to them, or too far away to understand.

Home becomes something else then—not just a place, but a claim. A piece of land in the heart where your name still sits, whether you stand on it or not. And maybe the quiet hope is this: that even in your absence, the lights are still on—not out of habit, but because someone expects you to return.

We were raised to live for love and family and home and togetherness, and I feel like I’ve betrayed them all. What I left exists no more. Not in the way I remember it. Not in the way it held me. It feels like I stepped out of something living, and by leaving, I broke the shape of it.

Do you feel me? Does anyone care? The past is now nowhere. It slips through me like something I can almost touch but never hold. A blur of ideas, softened at the edges, rearranging itself each time I try to remember. And I start to wonder—was it ever really there? Or did I build it out of longing, out of the need to belong to something whole?

Everything that was gained was gained together. Everything lost was lost together. That’s what makes it heavy. Not just the leaving—but the separation of what was never meant to be divided. There’s so much guilt in that. A quiet, constant weight. I wish I was there. Not even to change anything—just to be inside it again, to feel it without distance.

But this is life. Not cruel, just persistent. An eternal dissatisfaction with what is, always reaching for what is not. I wonder who I would be if I stayed. Would I still be singing, dancing, acting, praying? Would I still be eating and smiling, moving through the same small rituals that made everything feel full?

If so, then nothing would have changed. Not really. Because I am my family. Not separate from it. Not in opposition to it. I carry it the way a house carries its foundation—unseen, but holding everything up.

And the further I stray, the closer we stay. Not in distance, but in essence. Because leaving did not erase it. It only revealed how deeply it lives in me.

You are now Reading “The Outsider” - A Real Estate Newsletter