Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc

Moving day was a disaster, which was not unexpected.

Three things broke, one of which was irreplaceable and two of which she had specifically said to handle with care. The weather turned at noon. One of the friends they’d enlisted disappeared for an hour without explanation and returned with sandwiches, which was both maddening and exactly what was needed.

By seven in the evening they were sitting on the floor of the new apartment surrounded by boxes and the particular silence of a space that hasn’t been lived in yet.

Noa was calculating, internally, how long it would take to make this feel like a home. Based on previous experience, six months for function, two years for soul.

“Hey,” said Eli.

She looked at him. His hair was going in four directions and there was a mark on his forearm from where a box had caught him. He looked absurd and familiar and completely comfortable in the chaos.

“We made it,” he said.

“Barely.”

“We always barely make it.” He said it like a point of pride.

She laughed despite everything.

She thought about the word *home* then, and how she’d always imagined it as a fixed thing, a place. But watching him navigate the boxes to reach her, stepping over things with complete ease in a space neither of them knew yet — she understood it differently.

Home isn’t the apartment. It isn’t the arranged things. It’s the person who moves through the new chaos the same way they move through every other kind.

He handed her a sandwich.

“It’s a good apartment,” he said.

“It will be,” she said.

✦  Today’s Reflection

When did you realize that home, for you, had become a person rather than a place?

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