Don’t call it home if the walls don’t know your name, if the dust does not rise to embrace you, if the air does not taste of old songs & boiling herbs. You still think of home as a maiden at the hearth, a village with liquid dreams & metallic solitude, a house with laughter sitting in the corners like smoke from a three-stone fire. But home is a river; it does not wait; it’s gliding through time, shedding its skin. You left, & the soil quarrelled. The elders who called your name during moonlight tales are now mounds in the earth, their voices swallowed by abandonment. The narrow goat path you ran barefoot is now a tarred road where strangers walk, where children do not know your face, and where even the moon no longer leans to listen. & when you finally knock at the door, now held up loosely by rusting hinges, whispers would say the river no longer remembers your name. that it can’t say if you were ever part of its story or you were just a traveller crossing by.

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