This year will be my third year away from home. Three years since I last lived in the country whose heat, noise, and contradictions shaped me. Three years since I last woke up to the smell of breakfast drifting from our kitchen, or heard the familiar rise and fall of my family’s voices filling the house. Three years of airports, visas, new rooms, new countries, new selves. And despite how much has happened, or how much I tell myself I’ve grown used to distance, a part of me still feels the small tremor of leaving each time I pack my bags.

Maybe that is why I return often—at least in memory—to a conversation with my dad. It was one of those ordinary afternoons that somehow rearranges your life in hindsight. We were playing chess at the dining table, the way we’ve done since I was young. Our games were never truly about winning; they were a kind of quiet language between us.

At one point, after I made a clumsy move, he said something that seemed random at the time: “People change. I’ve changed over and over in my lifetime.”

I remember looking at him, puzzled. “What do you mean—changed how? Like Charmander evolving to Charmeleon and then Charizard?”

He paused for a moment, then burst into laughter. “Something like that,” he said. “But a little less dramatic.”

It should have ended there, the kind of exchange families have where one person tries to be profound and the other, in being literal, accidentally turns the moment into a joke. But he leaned back, looked at the board, and added something that has stayed with me far longer than he probably intended.

“The important thing,” he said, nudging his rook, “is touch move.”

For those who don’t play chess: touch move means that once you touch a piece, you must move it. You can’t change your mind. You can’t pretend you were considering something else.

You commit.

He said it simply, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. But I felt the weight of it even then. At the time, I thought he meant it as advice for the game. Now I understand it was advice for life.

Living abroad has a way of accelerating time. You shed versions of yourself constantly: the person who believed leaving home was temporary, the person who thought homesickness fades with routine, the person who underestimated how distance reshapes relationships.

People change, my dad said. And the truth is, I have changed too—often in ways that reveal themselves only when I go home and realize I no longer fit perfectly into the spaces I left behind.

But touch move. I chose this path. I touched this piece—the decision to study abroad, the decision to stay longer, the decision to grow in ways I couldn’t if I never left—and so I move it forward, even when it feels uncertain, even when I wonder what might have happened had I chosen differently.

What I didn’t understand back then is that touch move is not about refusing to feel doubt. It is about refusing to be ruled by it. It is about honoring your own decisions enough to see them through, to give them the time they need to unfold, even if the board looks unfamiliar and the next move is unclear.

Sometimes, when the loneliness catches me off guard, or when I feel the ache of missing birthdays and celebrations and ordinary days at home, I hear my dad’s voice across the years and distance. People change. And change is not a failure to stay rooted—it is the evolution required to keep moving.

Charmander to Charmeleon to Charizard. A joke, but also a truth. We are always in the process of becoming something more.

And once we touch the piece—our choices, our hopes, our futures—we move. We keep moving.