I was walking through the neighbourhood where I grew up last week. I hadn't been back in a while and the place does something specific to me that I've only recently started paying attention to.

Certain smells and certain sounds trigger something I can't immediately name. A restlessness underneath, quiet enough to ignore if you're not watching for it. I used to let it pass, but now, when it shows up, I stop and inspect.

The football field where I played every day with people I haven't seen in thirty years. Writings on the buildings, some faded, some still sharp. The path to school between apartment blocks, where I used to walk to school, looking at windows, wondering if somewhere in this neighbourhood there was a girl waiting to love me.

That memory stopped me cold as I recognized the feeling. I've been doing the same thing my entire adult life. Walking through the world looking for someone to make it feel safe.

My mother had a sentence she said so often it became the air in our home. "Everywhere is nice, but nothing beats home." I can still smell it where she said it. That hallway was where I re-entered the sanctuary every time. The scent of fresh bedsheets still puts me to sleep like I'm eight years old. That feeling was peace. Home was peace. And home was always a person and a place, never something I carried inside myself.

I'm sure it started before, but that is the first thing I remember. Safety was always located somewhere outside of me. In a person, in a version of the world small enough to feel known. When I left for rugby tournaments, I was excited to go. The moment I arrived I wanted to come back. Same with school excursions, weekends away with friends, holidays. Any time I left my little safe haven, part of me was already counting the hours until I could return.

My marriage lasted ten years. When it ended I felt almost nothing. Around that time I met someone. She had nothing to do with the marriage ending. She filled the blank it left. I don't think I loved her exactly. I loved having someone. The same way I'd loved having someone for ten years of marriage. When she ended it a year later, it broke me worse than the divorce ever did. The empty streets, the certainty that I'd be alone permanently, that was all her leaving. Without someone there, I had no source of safety. The blank was back and I had nothing to fill it with

Here's what I keep sitting with. I spent my whole life looking for someone to love me. But I was never able to fully go after it. Something in me always kept one foot out. My pride, my sense of self-worth, whatever you want to call the thing that wouldn't let me become someone who begs. I told myself that was dignity. That I respected myself too much to chase anyone.

I'm less sure about that now. Walking through the neighbourhood last week, passing the buildings where that kid used to wander hoping love would find him without him having to risk anything, I wonder if the pride was just another version of the comfort zone. Going all in on someone means leaving the small, safe world completely. And the programme my mother installed, gently and without meaning to, said the safest place is the one you already know.

So I searched. But I searched with one hand on the door handle. Ready to go back to the known place the moment it got too far from home.

I think a lot of people are running something similar without seeing it. You learn early that safety lives in a specific place or a specific person. That lesson gets installed before you have language for it. A parent's sentence, a feeling you can't name but recognize instantly. From then on you spend your life trying to recreate that feeling in adult situations that were never built to provide it. Relationships, cities. When they don't deliver it, you move. When they do, you hold on so tight you suffocate the thing. And underneath both reactions is the same gap: you never learned that the feeling could come from inside you. So you keep looking for it in rooms and in people, and you keep being surprised when it leaves with them.

The scent of that entrance hallway is still the most peaceful thing I've ever felt. I don't think that's a problem. I think the problem is I spent thirty years looking for that peace in other people instead of learning to build it inside myself.

I'm working on that now. With my family, with mu.hr, I'm closer than I've ever been to carrying the feeling instead of chasing it. But I'd be lying if I said the kid between the buildings is gone. He's still in there. And I don't think he's finished looking.

Or that's what I like to believe. I'm not fully sure yet.