Refuge

Refuge. It’s not some spiritual Airbnb with incense and soothing playlists—it’s the foxhole you crawl into when the world starts throwing punches with brass knuckles. It’s where the noise drops out and you can finally breathe without tasting blood. Nobody lives in a refuge. You visit. You repair. You recalibrate the circuitry before staggering back into the chaos, wild-eyed and half-lucid, but ready for another round.

My home is that bunker. A ramshackle temple of ratty t-shirts and threadbare shorts where I sing off-key to the dogs and they wag along like I’m Freddie Mercury in a mental breakdown. It’s where I can rage, weep, and nap with religious zeal. No judgment, no performance—just the raw, unfiltered animal me, trying to remember what it means to be human again.

The dogs—Christ, the dogs—are pure refuge. Living embodiments of unconditional amnesty. They don’t care about my sins, my deadlines, or the wreckage in my head. They speak in tail wags, nose bumps, and that occasional act of gleeful defiance that reminds me they’re alive and free and so am I, if only I remember to notice. When I sit with them, the static fades. Time slows. I can feel the pulse of the world syncing back into rhythm.

Music helps too—anything loud enough to rattle the ghosts out of my ribcage. Books, good ones, crack the skull open and let a little light in. And conversations with the real ones—the kind of people who don’t flinch when you hand them your darkness and ask them to hold it for a while.

That’s refuge. You crawl in, patch the leaks, get your bearings, and then push back off into the maelstrom. Because as the old-timer at my Saturday morning home group used to growl between sips of burnt coffee, “A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what it’s for.”