I don't know,
am I your home,
or am I your sanctuary?

A home is where you return without any reason.
Where your body remembers the way even when your soul is too tired to feel.

You arrive undone, and still you stay.

It holds everything you don't show the world:
the mess, the silence, the parts of you
that doesn't survive daylight.

A home doesn't ask you to be whole.
It breaks with you,
bleeds with you,
heals with you.

You take care of it.
Not out of obligation,
but because losing it
would feel like losing yourself.

A home is never a place.
It's a decision you make every day
without ever calling it a choice.

It is where you remain.
But a sanctuary,

a sanctuary is where you go
when you can't bear your own life.

You arrive carrying everything, as a refugee.
Exhaustion, emptiness, things you never say out loud.
You lay them down for a moment, and you pretend they don't belong to you.

You take what you need.
warmth that isn't yours,
comfort that you never built,
a silence that doesn't ask questions.

And for a while, it feels enough.
Until it doesn't.

And then you leave. You always leave.

Not loudly, just quietly enough.
To make it feel like nothing was ever real.

You say you'll come back.
And maybe you do.
But only when something inside you
starts collapsing again.

The sanctuary remember you,
in fragments, in absence, in return.

It waits.
Not because it hopes,
but because it has nowhere else to go.

It stands still while time moves through it without mercy,
collecting dust in places your presence once touched.

Echoes of laughter that were never meant to last.
Warmth that was never meant to stay.

Owned, but untouched.
Opened, but never chosen.

A place that exists for you,
but never with you.

And I am here,
Somewhere between being kept
and being left behind.

Between being held
and being used as a place to rest.

I feel you in pieces.
Never enough to stay,
always enough to return.

And maybe that's the cruelest part.

Not that you leave, but that you know.
I will still be here, when you come back.

So tell me.

Am I your home,
or just the place you go to survive,
until you're ready to live again?

Because I don't know
which one hurts more.

Being loved like a home,
or being needed like a refugee.