You reach a certain age—let’s say sixty-eight, though the number feels like a prank someone played on me—and you realize you’ve spent your entire life as a placeholder. You’re the person who ensures the laundry is done and the fridge is full, the quiet engine in a house that technically belongs to a mortgage company and a husband who thinks "helping out" is a favor he does for you. And then you finally get it into your head to go "home." To the place your parents wept for every Christmas while they were busy scrubbing floors in a country that didn't want them. You expect a homecoming, some kind of cosmic click of a lock, but instead, you’re just a tourist with a familiar nose and a pathetic, stunted vocabulary. You sit in a kitchen in a village that should be yours, smelling the burnt sugar and the diesel and the heavy, humid air that your mother described like it was holy. You’re surrounded by cousins who have your eyes and your laugh, but they’re looking at you like you’re a museum exhibit. "The American," they call you. They speak fast, their words tangling together in a way that makes you feel like a child again, grasping for meaning and coming up with nothing but handfuls of dust. You realize that we humans are fundamentally incapable of belonging anywhere once we’ve been uprooted. We’re like those air plants—we survive, we look green, but we don't have any real grip on the earth. Sometimes you just want to scream at them. You want to tell these relatives who think you’re a walking ATM that you spent forty years being a servant to a family that barely notices when you enter a room. You want to explain that your life wasn't some gilded dream of Western excess, but a slow, grinding erasure of everything you were supposed to be. But you can't say that because your accent is wrong and you don't know the word for "erasure" in their dialect. So you just sit there, nodding like a bobblehead, smiling until your face aches, and feeling like an intruder in your own bloodline. It’s the same thing back in the States, isn't it? You go to the grocery store and you’re the woman with the "interesting" heritage and the "exotic" recipes. People look at you and see a bridge. But they don't realize that bridges don't have a home; they’re just things people walk over to get somewhere else. I’ve spent my life being a bridge for my kids, for my husband, for my parents. And now that the kids are gone and my husband is busy being "retired" by falling asleep in front of the news, I’m just standing here in the middle of a river, wondering which bank I’m supposed to belong to. I know, I know. "Oh poor you, you have a retirement and a plane ticket and a house with a dishwasher." Save it. I’ve earned the right to be miserable in two different hemispheres. There is a specific kind of loneliness that comes from being the only person who knows how much you’ve sacrificed to be a "success" in a country that still thinks you’re a guest. You spend decades suppressing your own desires, burying that "more" you wanted, only to find out that the place you were saving your heart for doesn't even recognize you. You’re a foreigner everywhere, a ghost haunting a life that was never actually yours. The other night, my cousin’s daughter asked me what it was like over there, in the "real world." I wanted to tell her it’s a place where you can be surrounded by people for fifty years and still be completely untranslatable. I wanted to tell her that being a stay-at-home mother in a foreign land is like being in a sensory deprivation tank where the only thing you can hear is the sound of your own identity evaporating. Instead, I told her it was "fine" and gave her twenty dollars for some shoes she didn't need. It’s easier to be a wallet than a person. People understand money. They don't understand the hollowness of being a woman who belongs to everyone and nowhere at the same time. It’s 2am and the mosquitoes are eating me alive and I’m typing this on a phone that cost more than my grandfather made in a year. I feel like a fraud. I’m a cliché, a walking mid-life crisis that forgot to happen at forty and waited until the joints started creaking. We like to pretend that we can go back, that the "homeland" is some kind of magical reset button. It isn't. It’s just another place where you don't fit, another kitchen where you’re the odd one out. I think we spend our whole lives trying to find a version of ourselves that someone else will recognize. We curate these identities—the Good Daughter, the Devoted Mother, the Successful Immigrant—and we wear them like armor until we realize the armor is empty. There’s no one inside. Just a collection of stories told in two different languages, neither of which can quite describe the feeling of being a permanent guest in your own skin. Fight me on it if you want, but some of us were just born to be the space between things. Not the destination. Just the gap.