Nobody seems to understand, so
Let me try and explain myself.
I was homeless within a home;
Crying at 3 am under itchy covers.
I had a roof over my head, but I was
Surrounded by nothing more than
four walls.
A home without a heartbeat is only a
House.

A few months later,
the walls came crashing down, and the
roof opened up to the sky.
The insides of what was left
behind were now being shoved into a
foreign shell: A
New house with no heartbeat.
The walls were wider and the
roof was higher,
allowing for more space to breathe but..
It was just me.
Though the old insides came along,
those who once surrounded my
occupied shell I called "home" were
nowhere to be found and I
realized that it didn't matter how much
extra room I had to breathe or
how much space I had between walls because
It was just me.
I filled the insides with what used to
belong to the old outsides;
I blocked the new outside, out to keep the
old Insides, in and
the space I once had started filling
up with things from people
I no longer had
ahold of but I couldn't figure out how to
Let go.

A month passed, and that quickly turned into
2 months then 4.
I slowly started opening the door and
letting new outsides in, but,
My house was still a home with no
Heartbeat because my heart was stuck in
the shell of what I thought was a
house but was really a home and
they always say,
“You never know what you have until it's gone” but I
did know, I just
thought it was something that I wasn't.
Or maybe I thought it wasn't something
that it really was.

Like a turtle, I learned to adapt to my new shell,
once it's inhabited for so long,
It becomes your home.
But every now and then I find myself
craving my old house, my insides that
used to be out, and I can't let that go.
I can hear the heartbeat
from a thousand miles
away and the voices are telling me to
go back but I
can't.
Because what happens if I go back and
realize that the heartbeat I heard was actually
This house trying to come to life
and that heartbeat dies out?

My house may have no heartbeat, but
Something here does,,
Someone outside does, and maybe, just
maybe that heartbeat will come slowly and
start out with the flicker of a candle flame or the
drip of a faucet,
But I'll be here,
Waiting,
still holding on just in case I build up the
courage to leave this place and go back...
After all,
I didn't know my house was a home with a heartbeat until I left it.