Ending this year with one quiet truth: dreams do come true.

I never really had a home I could call my own.

When I was a child, we lived at my grandmother’s house. My father had taken over his father’s business, but it didn’t work out. Or maybe he couldn’t. Electricity bills were never paid on time, and every seven or eight months the dues would pile up so much that the power department would cut the connection. Almost every year, for two or three months, we lived in darkness often right in the middle of peak summer.

By the time I was eight, all the savings were gone. We were bankrupt.

My eldest sister was sent to live with one relative. The second eldest with another. My mother and I were sent to a different city, to a rented place. Calling it an apartment would be generous. It was a single-room, government-allotted cottage on the outskirts of the city, inside what felt like an abandoned park. For ten or twelve kilometers, there were barely eight houses. Most were empty. We almost never saw anyone. There was a strange feeling in that place — an eerie silence that still crawls up my spine when I remember it. During the monsoons, every corner of that room leaked.

We lived there for a year. After that, life became a cycle of moving from one rented house to another. My mother had a habit of buying anything that could be even slightly useful for a home. Slowly, we collected everything a house needs- utensils, furniture, boxes of memories. Everything, except the house itself.

We had so much stuff that whenever shifting came up, I would start crying. The idea of packing our entire life into boxes again felt unbearable.

After my mother passed away, my sisters and I started living together. Once, when we had to move again, we finalized a place, paid the deposit, and went there with all our belongings. That’s when the owner looked at our things and said he wouldn’t give us the house because we had “too much luggage.”

At that moment, we were literally on the road. We couldn’t go back to the old place, and this new house was suddenly not ours. Somehow by sheer luck or grace we found another place within two hours and shifted there the same day.

For the last seven years, my sisters and I have lived separately because of work. I’ve stayed in every kind of rented place cheap ones, expensive ones, but all of them came with the same familiar problems. Problems I had accepted as permanent.

Until today.

Today, at the age of 28, I made the biggest purchase of my life. I signed the papers for my own house.

Yes. My own home.

It has always been my dream to have a place that no one could take away, a door I wouldn’t have to return the keys to. It took me twenty years to reach here. It took fear, loss, instability, and endless moving.

But my dream did come true.

Ending this year knowing one thing for sure: dreams really do come true.