There comes a moment, quiet and unassuming, when you realize that home is no longer a single place. It’s scattered across continents, tucked into the corners of cafés where laughter once echoed, folded into letters never sent, and stitched into the smiles of those you’ve loved in faraway lands.

You will never be completely at home again—not in the way you once were—because part of your heart will always be elsewhere. It will linger in the warmth of a friend’s embrace oceans away, in the scent of a street you used to walk, in the language that once felt foreign but now feels like a lullaby.

This ache, gentle and persistent, is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place. It’s the bittersweet gift of a soul that has stretched beyond borders, of a heart that has dared to belong to many.

And though it may leave you longing, it also leaves you luminous—because to love in many places is to live in many lives. And that, dear one, is a kind of magic the world rarely grants.

©️ Beatriz Esmer