Prompt: A childhood place that made you feel safe.
Axl Rose sang about a warm, safe place where, as a child, he would hide and pray for the thunder and the rain to quietly pass. When I sang those lyrics, I kept circling that place in my mind, like walking past a house at night and wondering who lives there and what stories are inside. Where was it? What did it look like? Did it smell like rain, or like dust, or like a home that has been carrying histories longer than I had ever experienced. Was there room for another heart, or was it meant to be a solitary shelter? I also wondered why thunder and rain carried fear at all. Guns N’ Roses never revealed any detail about the space, but they hinted at a world without violent streets, without addiction, without love that wounds, and without that deep, rattling question of whether I deserve to exist here. They hinted at a place where the mind loosens, the body unclenches, and the soul finally exhales. A place that leans close and whispers that I matter. Everyone needs a space like that, especially in the years when the world grows louder than any child can tolerate.
My safe place was never a single room or secret hiding spot. My refuge arrived as words. School became the doorway, books the shelter, and language the quiet country I could travel without asking permission. Inside sentences, storms that belonged to me lost their teeth. Inside stories, I could breathe. I could sit with characters who carried their own griefs, their own bewilderment, and still somehow moved forward. In those pages, a different kind of safety revealed itself, not the kind that erases the world, but the kind that steadies a body long enough to survive it.
Nine schools before graduation. New towns. New faces. New rules about belonging. Again and again. The desks I occupied became the closest thing to permanence. The classroom did not care about orders, moving trucks, or how many times a heart could be asked to reset. Bulletin boards held more order and consistency than the houses I called home. School libraries felt like cathedrals, quiet and alive, each book humming with an invitation: Sit. Listen. Stay awhile. On air bases that never quite turned into home, the constants were teachers taking attendance, paper waiting for stories, and books wide enough to hold a kid who needed a place to land.
Over time, I learned something that felt almost sacred. Safety is not always locked behind a door. Sometimes it lives inside a paragraph, inside a voice on the page telling the truth without apology. Sometimes it lives in the discipline of showing up, sitting down, and letting language hold what feels too heavy to carry alone.
That was my warm, safe place. Not made of walls. Not built with wood or brick. My shelter came stitched together with words, strong enough to weather the thunder, patient enough to wait for the rain to pass, and honest enough to remind me that I matter, even when the world forgets to say it out loud.
Muddled Soma 