When Home Stops Feeling Safe

It is Sunday, and the world outside my window is slowing itself down.

After two days of brutal cold, the snow has started again, falling thick and steady, the kind that absorbs sound and presses everything into a quieter register. Cars move cautiously down Main Street, fewer of them with each passing hour. Businesses are closing early. People are hunkering down. There is a collective, unspoken understanding that now is the time to be inside, to wait, to let the storm do what it is going to do.

Sundays are the day I try hardest to protect. They are meant to be my ultimate rest day of the week, the one where I let my nervous system unclench just a little. A day for the couch, a movie on in the background, and William Wallace curled up beside me, warm and fluffy and entirely unconcerned with the state of the world. The kind of day that signals safety through routine alone.

This morning, I went to the Co-op early, before the snow really started to fall. I stood at the meat counter, asking the man behind it about the difference between a point-cut brisket and a flat cut. When he told me the point cut had more fat and more richness, I didn’t hesitate. I brought it home, seasoned it carefully, slid it into the oven, and set the timer for five hours.

By mid-morning, the apartment smelled warm and reassuring. Music played softly. The light stayed low. Everything about the scene suggested calm. If you were to step inside at any point today, you would likely register tranquility first. This would look like a woman at rest, tending to herself, sheltered from the worst of the weather.

But calm and safety are not the same thing, and I could feel the difference every time I reached for my phone.

Social media offered no gentle entry, no transition, no warning. Just an immediate flood of images and videos—slowed down, dissected, replayed from multiple angles—showing a young man being shot and killed by the government of the country I live in. Not metaphorically. Not rhetorically. Viscerally. Publicly. Repeatedly.

A few weeks ago, it was a woman. At the time, I avoided looking too closely, telling myself that I didn’t need to carry every horror that passed through my feed. I tried to keep it at a distance, to preserve some small pocket of interior quiet. But this time, the distance collapsed. It felt unavoidable, as though the violence itself had crossed the threshold of my carefully constructed Sunday and taken a seat beside me on the couch.

What unsettled me most was not surprise, but recognition.

The sensation moved quickly through my body, familiar and unwelcome: the tightening in my chest, the low-level scanning for danger, the sense that safety—something I had long assumed as a baseline—was suddenly conditional. Fragile. Subject to forces far beyond my control.

That feeling carried me back, without effort, to a time when fear lived much closer to the surface.

Years ago, I was living in Quito, Ecuador, in a second-story apartment with cement walls and wooden floors. The windows were enormous, stretching nearly from floor to ceiling, facing the main avenue that ran through the heart of the city. Under normal circumstances, these windows filled the space with light and movement and the constant rhythm of urban life.

But during a military coup, everything changed.

The capitol building had been taken over. Soldiers with guns occupied the streets. Traffic disappeared entirely. The city fell into an eerie, unnatural quiet, broken only by the sharp, unmistakable sounds of gunfire. People retreated into their homes, into their apartments, into themselves.

I remember crouching low on the couch, my body folded inward, trying to make myself as small as possible. Even though I was above street level, I didn’t trust the height. I didn’t trust the walls. I didn’t trust the windows. I was afraid to stand up straight, afraid that even lifting my head might make me visible. The television was on, not for comfort, but tuned to the live news, reporters broadcasting in real time what was happening in the streets just down the road from my building. Images flickered across the screen while the sounds outside confirmed that none of it was theoretical.

I stayed low, watching, listening, waiting.

I remember wanting to come home to the U.S. with an intensity that surprised me. Wanting to get to the airport. Wanting to be on a plane. Wanting the uncomplicated belief that my own country was safe, that it was a place where this kind of fear did not belong. I wanted to go somewhere familiar and protected, somewhere that could hold me without asking me to be constantly alert.

Eventually, Quito returned to itself. The streets filled again. The soldiers disappeared. Life resumed, almost seamlessly, as if nothing had happened.

But my body never forgot what it learned there.

That sense of displacement, of realizing that home can stop feeling safe without warning, settled somewhere deep and stayed. And today, on this quiet Sunday with snow falling outside and a brisket slowly cooking in the oven, it surfaced again with a weight I was not prepared for.

Because this time, there is no other home to reach for.

Today, I recognize with a heavy, aching clarity that I no longer feel safe in my own country, at least not in the unquestioned way I once did. That loss feels like grief, even though there is no single moment to point to, no clear before and after. It is a slow erosion, a realization that something foundational has shifted while I was busy living my life, building routines, trusting that certain things simply were.

I don’t know how to process that grief when I am still here, still going to the Co-op, still structuring my Sundays around rest and nourishment and the small domestic rituals that make life feel manageable. I don’t know how to mourn safety while remaining inside the place that no longer guarantees it.

The world feels smaller lately, not in distance but in possibility. Fear feels closer to the surface everywhere I look, woven into conversations, silences, and the way people brace themselves for what might come next. My imagination wants to run ahead, fueled by old narratives about collapse and endings and rescue, stories I absorbed growing up about how the world might fall apart and who would be saved when it did.

And yet, here I am, sitting on the couch with William Wallace’s steady weight against my leg, the oven humming softly in the background, the snow continuing its quiet work outside. The brisket will be done soon. The storm will pass, at least this one. The house smells like care and intention and something meant to sustain.

I don’t know who rescues us from this kind of fear, or how safety is rebuilt once it has been punctured so publicly and so repeatedly. I don’t know what comes next, or how we are meant to carry all of this while still showing up for ordinary life.

All I know is that today looks peaceful from the outside, and feels anything but from within, and that the distance between those two things has never felt quite so wide.

-Amanda