There are three rooms in this building.
Three small boxes stacked side by side, each one breathing in its own way.

The room on the left is loud.
Sometimes it’s laughter, sometimes it’s shouting — but it’s always full of sound. The woman there has a voice that rises like smoke, sharp and fast. Her words hit the wall and stay there.
Some nights she goes quiet, steps outside, and cries where no one can see her.
Other nights, she throws something just to hear it break.
I’ve heard her voice tremble between anger and ache.
Even when she’s still, you can feel her warmth through the walls —
a warmth that burns if you stay too close for too long.
I call her the fire.

The room on the right is silent.
Curtains drawn, air heavy. Sometimes I think no one lives there at all.
But every now and then, faint music leaks through —
low, broken notes that sound like they’re trying to remember a melody.
They never last long.
Once, I heard a chair scrape, a cup fall, and then nothing.
Silence settled again, thick as dust.
I call that room the hollow.

And then there’s me — in the middle.
Between fire and hollow.
Between the woman whose heat could melt anything and the man whose absence could freeze it all.

When I was younger, I used to think the walls were my fault —
that maybe if I was quieter, or softer, or smaller,
the shouting next door would stop.
That maybe if I knocked long enough,
the silence on the other side would finally open.

Now I know these walls were always theirs —
built from the pieces of what they couldn’t be for each other.
And somehow, I was left to live between them.

I’ve been here for years, trying to make this middle room a home.
Some days, I wake to the sound of her voice — fierce, familiar, alive —
and I feel the heat in my own chest rise with it.
Other days, I wake to his silence — cold and endless —
and I sink into it until I forget what warmth feels like.

I keep rearranging the furniture.
Small things.
A lamp instead of a ceiling light.
A plant near the window.
Soft music that doesn’t drown the noise, but balances it.
I tell myself that maybe the goal isn’t to silence either wall —
maybe it’s to learn how to live between them.

Because both of them built me.
The noise. The quiet.
The fire that taught me how to feel.
The hollow that taught me how to listen.

And maybe healing isn’t about choosing one over the other.
Maybe it’s about creating space for both —
acknowledging that the extremes are part of me,
but they don’t have to define the room I live in.

So I keep breathing.
I let her warmth hum through one wall
and his stillness echo through the other.
I let them both exist.

And on some nights — when the shouting softens and the silence hums low —
the building exhales with me.
And for a moment,
I am not too much or too little.
Not burning or disappearing.
Just here.
Halfway home.

Writers Note

I wrote Halfway Home after another night of feeling like I was too much for the world and not enough for myself.
I was reflecting on my relationships — romantic, platonic — and how I keep swinging between both ends.

More especially,

I was reflecting on my relationship with my mother and father.
There are days when I feel like I’m overflowing, giving too much, loving too loudly.
And then there are days when I go quiet, where I pull back so far it feels like I’ve disappeared.

Recording this was my way of sitting in that feeling — of asking myself if I deserve love, and if I do, whether I can exist in the middle of it.
A place where I can love and be loved without shrinking, without spilling over.
Where the love I give feels like enough and not too much.
Where I feel like enough.

Writing this was me holding both ends — the anger that burns, the sadness that sinks — and still choosing to breathe through it.
It’s me trying to learn that it’s okay to exist in both spaces while I create a space in between.
That maybe healing doesn’t mean arriving.

Maybe it means staying —
somewhere halfway home,
in the in-between,
inside these unfinished rooms — in the Fragments.