I felt untethered and adrift. I lay in that room and realized that everything we owned smelled like someone else’s unfamiliar cooking. When I put my head down on my arms at school, closing my eyes for a minute to take a break from everything, even my own sweater didn’t smell like myself, like my own home. It was a constant reminder that we didn’t belong anywhere, that we were out of place and lost—not a real family, just the leftover scraps of one.
