I immigrated from Bangladesh when I was four. 

The bustling sounds of rickshaws and food carts gave way to the wail of sirens, the rumble of subway trains, the hum of a city that never slept. 

I was too young to hold onto the details of my first home, 

but I carried its echoes in the stories my parents told, 

in the smell of my mother’s cooking, 

in the way Bengali words felt soft yet distant on my tongue. 

I first returned the summer before my junior year of high school, a long flight across oceans, a descent into heat and humidity that clung to my skin. I traded glass towers for rice paddies, pavement for dirt roads. 

The air smelled different, earthier, heavier. 

as if the land itself remembered what I could not. 

Family I barely recognized greeted me like I had never left. 

Their faces were familiar yet foreign, their warmth both comforting and overwhelming. 

I saw my grandmother, her mind lost in the fog of Alzheimer’s. 

Her mind did not remember my name, but her hands did. 

Soft, wrinkled palms traced my face like they had when I was small. Her touch reminded me that love does not always need memory to exist. 

Now at Yale, I am in my third home. 

A place of stone buildings and hurried footsteps, 

of opportunity and pressure, of belonging and displacement. 

I move between spaces, 

never quite sure which one I truly belong to. 

Bangladesh is a place I left too early to remember, 

New York is a city I grew up in but never fully felt rooted in, 

and Yale 

Yale is a place I am still trying to understand. 

Maybe home is not a single place, 

but a patchwork of moments, people and memories 

some sharp, some faded, some I have yet to create.