Not occasionally. Not in the polite sense we use when we are trying to be humble. In every real and permanent sense of the word. We are guests on this earth, which was here long before we arrived and will continue long after we have gone. We are guests in our countries, in our cities, in the streets we walk every day as though we own them. We are guests in our homes, which someone else built, on land that someone else cleared, in neighbourhoods that someone else made worth living in. We are guests in our own rooms, which will belong to someone else the moment we stop needing them.
None of us was asked. None of us applied. We arrived and the place was already ready, and we walked in and settled and somewhere in the settling, something shifted. Not all at once. Not with any announcement. The shift happened in the quiet space between the first time someone opened a door for us and the hundredth time we walked through it without thinking. Someone prepared that room. Someone cleared that path. Someone paid a price we did not see and will never be asked to repay. We did not earn the welcome. We received it. And receiving something, it turns out, is not the same as deserving it, no matter how long you have been holding it.
Most of us know this, somewhere. We just stop knowing it out loud.
The person who forgets they were invited stops borrowing and starts owning. They stop being grateful and start being entitled. They stop seeing the host and start seeing a service. This happens slowly, quietly, in the space between the first welcome and the tenth, and by the time it is complete the guest has no idea it happened at all.
What follows is not a manual. It is not a list of rules with a score at the end. It is something closer to a mirror, held up without apology, in the direction of behaviour most of us recognise but few of us name. The guests in these pages are not monsters. They are people, which is both the problem and the point. They are people who arrived somewhere, were welcomed, and somewhere between the welcome and the leaving, forgot what they were.
You will recognise them. Some of them will be people you know. One or two of them, if you are honest on the right day, will be closer to home than that.
That is not an accusation. It is an invitation to look.
The door was opened. What happened next is what these pages are about.