A Home Without Walls

Asaiah sat on the edge of her bed, staring at the ceiling. The faint hum of the ceiling fan matched the rhythm of her thoughts—whirling, repetitive, endless. She had always thought of this house as her safe place, her sanctuary. It had taken years for her to realize it wasn’t a home, not for her, not really.

Growing up, Asaiah’s father had seemed like a fair man, at least on the surface. He never raised his voice, never imposed impossible rules. But fairness, she had come to understand, was more than silence. Fairness required action, and inaction had told her more than words ever could.

Her mother, on the other hand, had been vocal. “Asaiah,” she’d say, “the world isn’t kind to girls. You need to learn to expect less.” Asaiah had hated those words, hated the resignation in her mother’s tone. It was as though she was being prepared for failure before she even had the chance to dream.

Her brothers were different. Their successes were celebrated; their failures were shielded. When someone criticized them, her mother’s voice would ring out like a battle cry, fierce and unyielding. But when Asaiah faced the same, her mother’s response was always the same: “Why didn’t you defend yourself?” And if she did defend herself? “Don’t bring shame to your father.”

Asaiah had let it slide for years. “She’s a mother,” she’d reasoned. “Sons are her pride.” But the imbalance weighed on her. Her father, though, had always seemed indifferent, caring only about her grades. “Storm the weather,” he’d say. “As long as you’re doing well in school, nothing else matters.”

But it did matter.

Things had happened to Asaiah, things she didn’t speak of, not to her parents, not to anyone. She told herself it was fine—it was in the past. But some wounds didn’t heal; they festered, growing deeper over time.

It wasn’t until her teenage years that Asaiah began to notice the subtler ways her father viewed her. “When you and your sister grow up, you’ll leave,” he’d say. But when he spoke of her brothers, it was always, “This is their home. They’ll carry on the family name.”

The words had lodged in her chest like a splinter. Was that all she was to him? A guest? A temporary resident until some other man came along to “claim” her? The idea enraged her, but more than that, it broke her. She wanted to scream, to ask, “What if I don’t want to get married? What if I want to stay here, to belong?”

But she knew the answer. A daughter wasn’t meant to belong.

Asaiah had spent countless nights scrolling through social media, watching videos of fathers who hugged their daughters, who called them “my home.” She envied those girls, their carefree smiles, their certainty that they were loved unconditionally.

Her father loved her, she knew that. But his love had boundaries—walls built by tradition, by expectations, by the silent belief that daughters were visitors in their fathers’ homes.

Asaiah vowed to break free. She would forge her own path, create her own home, one where she belonged without question. And one day, when she no longer needed his money or his approval, she would ask him:

“Did you ever think of me as yours? Or was I always just passing through?”

Until then, she would wait. She would dream of a day when she didn’t need permission to return to her own home, a day when she wasn’t a visitor, but a builder of something entirely her own.