“At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.” – Warsan Shire

Home is a word my tongue has struggled to form. It is a word that means consistent, stable, reliable. A place that wraps around you like a blanket. A place that swaddles you with comfort and protects your smallest, sweetest secrets. Home is a place I know like that one friend of a friend who maybe came to a club with us on a hazy Saturday, but I don’t really remember. We’ve met and she was probably nice, but I could not tell you her name or where she lives. Home is a place I’m not sure I want.

I spent most of my adolescence in motion; from state-to-state, city-to-city, suburb-to-suburb, and then eventually country-to-country. Consistent. Stable. Reliable. All words I would never have used to describe my life or myself. Words that felt ill fitted on my anxious back. Instead, I preferred wild, adventurous, bold. I was the friend who always chose dare, the one that sprinted towards recklessness.

In many ways, I am still that friend, just now with one massive difference: routine. A year and a half in Detroit and I officially have a record high number of months spent in one city since I was 13. I am finding myself a regular at my favorite bars. I volunteer with the same organizations. I have neighbors whose names I know. There is a sense of monotony in my life I have not experienced in over a decade. It is both the most comforting feeling I have ever met and the most suffocating. I have never known myself in one place, standing still.

Detroit is the place my grandparents were born and raised, where my mother was born and raised and where I was born. I am not sure that I am yet ‘raised’, as I find myself squirming, struggling to grow. I am, however, eager to see the role this city, and the consistency it is providing me, will play in my life.