You can only build it, slowly, with another person willing to build it back, out of the cheap and inexhaustible materials that were available to two broke and lonely people all along: attention, presence, a shared meal, and the daily decision to take the coat off first.

I came looking for a door that locked and a rent I could pay.

What I found in the spare room at the top of the stairs was the thing I’d actually been priced out of my whole life and never had a word for, and the word, it turns out, was home — not the one you’re given, but the one two lonely people build on purpose, one shared meal and one taken-off coat at a time.

THE END.