On a sunny afternoon in late September at Dade- land Mall in Miami, FL, I stood in line at Sephora with my friend. My phone rang, I picked it up, and received the news from my dad that they had sold our house and would be moving to Kentucky in a month. Movers were already in the house, packing my things into boxes. I listened, responded “Okay,” and hung up the phone.

I had not even known the house was on the market. I had just heard talks of putting it up for sale at some point in the next year or two, but here I was, a month into my freshman year of college and severed from the hometown I had known for 15 years. I felt betrayed that my parents had kept this from me, distraught that I did not know the last time in my childhood bedroom would be the last time. I was overcome with shock, betrayal, grief, and homesickness for a home that did not exist anymore.

My first instinct was to ghost my parents while I brooded over the thought of a stranger handling my cherished belongings. I had a makeshift corkboard covered in years of collected memories: county fair tickets, polaroids from childhood, scraps of paper that meant nothing to anyone but me. How does something like that travel in a box?

I wanted to ignore their texts and avoid each call until the sound of their voices no longer made me want to scream at them for taking away all I had known without warning. In my first three months of college, my parents had become fallible beings who could hurt me in previously unfathomable ways.

I thought I could punish them by acting cold, but that made my already lingering homesickness so much worse, because they were who I was homesick for.

My parents felt this resentment and tried to mend what they could with gestures of kindness: extra money for food, photos of my pets. But this made our disconnect feel deeper and our distance feel farther. The homesickness grew, but I couldn’t talk to the only people who could remedy it, trapping me in a paradox for weeks.

After some time, I accepted that my parents had reasons for moving, and for the way they went about it, reasons that were beyond the comprehension of my 18-year-old brain. My parents had financial pressures and life experiences I could not grasp at a third of their age.

As I ran out of energy to be angry, I gave an exhausted surrender. I swallowed my feelings and chose to move forward, not because I fully understood, but because I could not afford not to. There was no getting the house back, no going back in time to be told sooner. Why ruminate over things outside of my control?

I still don’t know exactly what I let go of. The house, Glenview, the resentment, some version of who my parents were to me. Maybe all of it.

I’m still figuring out what home means now that the place is gone. What I do know is that I was not really grieving a house. I was grieving a home where everything felt stable and predictable.

But home is not my corkboard or the walls I could not say goodbye to; it is the people I almost pushed away.