When I was around three years old, my father went to Korea for work. Two years later, my mother told me that our old house would be demolished and that we had to move. I remember feeling deeply sad. That house was where I had spent my earliest memories, and I was strongly attached to it. But I didn't show my feelings. I didn't want to make things harder for my mother. She was already going through a lot—my brother was sick, and she was visiting doctors frequently. So I stayed quiet and simply agreed. The last night in my old house still lives quietly inside me. I can still see the room, the familiar walls, and my brother beside me as we watched a cartoon that suddenly felt more precious than anything else. I didn't know it then, but I was saying goodbye to a part of my childhood that would never come back. We moved to a new house. It was bigger, but it felt empty. Nothing inside it belonged to me yet. I didn't feel connected to it, and I wasn't used to the children in that street, so I mostly stayed at home. One day, I decided to go outside and play with them. They were playing a game with a ball, where two players would throw it at the people standing in the center. I asked if I could join. At first, they refused—or maybe they simply didn't want me to play. But eventually, they allowed me to join. I felt happy, thinking I might finally make friends. But in one moment, everything changed. Someone threw the ball, and it hit my face very hard. I don't know whether it was intentional or not, but what stayed with me wasn't the pain itself. I had trusted those children and thought they would be careful with me because I was much younger than them. In that moment, that trust shattered. From that day on, it became difficult for me to trust them, and I grew afraid of playing ball games. I wanted to cry, but I didn't. At five years old, I thought being strong meant hiding my tears. I kept telling myself that everything was fine, but deep down, I knew it wasn't. I never told anyone about what happened. Instead, I buried it deep inside me. Around that time, I once saw my mother silently crying because of my brother's illness, trying to carry a weight far heavier than she should have carried alone. And I remember choosing silence—choosing to hide my own feelings so I wouldn't add to her pain. Maybe that was the moment I started keeping my feelings to myself. After the ball incident, I slowly started staying at home more. At first, it felt boring. I became very attached to my mother—she was my only safe place. I also missed my father terribly. I remember trying to make a parachute from plastic bags because I thought I could somehow fly all the way to Korea and see him. Looking back, it sounds funny, but to my five-year-old self, it felt completely possible. I began playing with mud. I made small sculptures—rabbits, houses, simple shapes—and showed them to my mother. She always smiled and praised me. That small encouragement meant everything. I started building entire little worlds from mud, decorating them with flowers. In my imagination, flowers became the people of those worlds. That creative space slowly became my comfort, my escape, my safe place. As I grew older, I began to understand that those mud houses were more than toys. They were places where nothing had to leave, where nobody was sick, and where I didn't have to pretend to be strong. While I couldn't control what happened around me, I could create something beautiful with my own hands. The world I built from mud and flowers eventually disappeared, but what it taught me never did: when life takes away your sense of belonging, you can still create your own place in the world.