We carry our homeland in our eyes, even as we walk away from the cities that once held us. Every street we left behind still whispers our names, and every house still echoes with the voices we could not take with us.
We did not leave because we wanted to. We were forced to leave. Pushed away from our own doorsteps, from our quiet mornings, from dreams that were growing gently inside us.
We did not abandon our homeland, we are still within it. But we became displaced inside its borders, moving through its wounds, searching for a place where the heart could breathe without fear, only to find that no corner felt safe, and every space we turned to seemed empty.
In this departure we did not choose, we carried nothing but trembling bodies and heavy memory. We left keys hanging on doors, photographs waiting on walls, school notebooks open on lessons that never finished, and dreams frozen in the middle of their story.
And as we left these pieces of our lives behind, home after home fell, and the streets that once knew our laughter became narrow corridors for escape. The silence of the abandoned streets pressed down on us, reminding us of what had been lost.
The camps we were told were temporary became lasting places, weighed down by time. Our bodies found shelter there, but our hearts remained at the door of the first home… knocking, though no one answers.
And with this constant displacement, one companion stayed with us: fear. It slips into the smallest moments, in bread lines, in the quiet hours before dawn. It rides the sound of aircraft, it lives in the silence where a familiar voice once was.
And yet, despite everything, we continue. We lift one another when we fall, holding on to the light that still shines within us, and to the whisper that says: we will endure, we will continue, no matter what.
What we ask for is simple — painfully simple: A roof that does not collapse, a door that is not shattered, and a child who can sleep without knowing fear.
We are not numbers, we are not headlines, we are not a story told today and forgotten tomorrow. And we simply want to live — just live — in peace, in dignity, in the homeland we loved, and still love, despite everything.