I know places that span continents,

Kilometers away from each other

I know of routes to houses,

Ones I haven’t lived in for years;

Ones I have seldom forgotten

I know of airports I can navigate like they were my second home

Etched in my mind like the handwriting of a loved one,

All the g’s and all the y’s written a certain way

I know of a terrace where the stars sing underneath a thick layer of clouds,

The staircase leading to it a calamity of height and guts,

A calamity of choosing between talking to the air or getting an extra hour of sleep

I know another place,

A rocky road,

A shade of red a dying star would envy,

One that I almost slipped off my cycle on

A product of two-wayed recklessness,

A recklessness that refuses to be fixed

There is another place,

This one a few thousand miles away,

Covered in blocks of neat tarmac,

Where I spent my days running,

Tripping,

Scratching my knee in the same spot,

Getting stung by an unbeknownst hive of bees waiting on sweet revenge,

Finding “secret” crevices in the most obvious spaces every evening,

Climbing up hills,

Rushing through thick greenery; the shade of emerald,

That was a ritual of mine, I suppose,

Filled with plants, bugs, giggles, and glee 

I know of a place that sits still at a 90° angle,

This one is the place farthest yet closest to me,

Home, I call it

A corner,

Unseeming,

Unnoticed,

Mundane,

Where a single streetlight towers, staggering to work on a rainy evening

There, love floats in all its glory

In all its tears,

In all its goodbyes,

It laughs while trying to conceal the pain of leaving,

It asks me why I do this to myself every once a while

I know of places that I cannot map out for you,

They exist in the thousands

They are tenants in a mind that traces every nook of theirs like muscle memory,

They lie in my psyche like vivid dreams you’d wish to live through, willingly,

Each holds a meaning,

A breath of mine,

A thought of mine,

How do I hold all of them in these unmistakably small hands of mine?

All these spaces,

Nooks,

Corners,

Terraces,

People; like the rivers they are

To describe them would be the process of examining a light,

So metaphorically astounding,

It never found a name for itself

But it did find a mattress and a pillow,

Within my heart,

Meant for its legs to rest

I close my eyes and sigh,

How could all this light,

So alive,

Yet so lost,

Get to reach home,

To live in it,

Without a single atom forcing it out?