Home is where Crumb Creek runs, the bones of bunnies buried across the bridge. Where the tulips vanished before I was born, stuffed animals wed and baby dolls nursed. A caterpillar squished under a toddler’s bare sole.

It’s a ballerina’s silhouette above the mantle, the heavy wooden door, a patch of garden abandoned, the room that’s not a room where I first wake up seizing. Home is where the fighting escalates then softens, a car floored in anger past the graves I named storybook characters for.

Home is split in two like an atom, both houses warm but ominous. A cat named Kiwi found dead in the basement, puppies born squirming in a bush. A funeral for a songbird. A blue attic bedroom, a mattress on the floor, a radiator pressed hot against paralyzed flesh.

Home is the abandonment on Spruce street, a room for two occupied alone.  It’s the room on Fairmount, strangers unbonded, a kiss on the couch and a drive to the beach. It’s the room on South 13th, earthquake-shaken mirror mistaken for a ghost, falling off the bed to escape closer tremors.

It’s the Ocean Parkway apartment with its countless plagues: flies and leaks, mice and roaches. A man with a 19 on his arm smoking out the window, an ottoman ripped to shreds by a Maine Coon in his prime. It’s the place on Lefferts, projects sparkling like jewels out the window, the diamond I accepted, the wife I became. It’s the duplex in Kensington, haunted by the spirits of exotic birds and fish. The sun’s glare on the patio, the nursery map missing all of North America and my two first pregnancies.

“Are you expecting yet?” The landlord asks after returning from an extended stay in Mexico. “Please, fill this house with babies.”

Home is not one place, never static, but it is where you stay, and it’s where we’re confined when the city stops breathing. This home, its history, a conception, our nesting; days spent heaped on the couch, nights spent jerking awake by the hour. The inability to bear another day without rearranging the furniture or cutting my own hair.

Home ages and breaks, needs care and repair. I try to love it back, but sorrow still slips into my bed like a shadow. There is no place like home, the shadow whispers. There is no such place.

Jennifer Markert is a writer, mother, and marketing professional based in Pennsylvania. A lifelong storyteller, she studied creative writing at Temple University and has been most recently published in KHORA and Sky Island Journal. She is currently finalizing a hybrid memoir about creation during times of plague.