Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata. This week, she writes about home and the ways it holds, shelters, excludes, and persists.
There are houses you can walk through in the dark without turning on a single light, your body remembering the exact distance between doorways, the slight unevenness of a threshold, the place where the wall narrows just enough that you instinctively turn sideways and then there are others where even in full daylight, nothing quite settles, where every object feels temporarily placed, as though it might be packed away again at short notice, where even the act of sitting down carries a faint awareness that you might have to leave.
The difference is not always ownership, or time, or even memory, but something more elusive in which a space either receives you fully or keeps you, gently but unmistakably, at its edge. Once you begin to notice that difference, the idea of home begins to shift, losing its certainty, loosening from the assumption that it is a place one simply has.