Living in Exile

America must understand this:

No one leaves home
because they are bored

No one places oceans
between themselves
and the people they love
for curiosity

Human beings are not trees
We do not rip our own roots from the earth
unless the ground beneath us
has stopped allowing us to live

My parents were not chasing luxury

They were chasing breath
Possibility
A future large enough
for their children to stand upright inside

And what courage it must require
to leave behind everyone you love
while pretending to your children
that you are not terrified

To smile on the journey
To call sacrifice an opportunity
To hide grief inside hard work

America sees immigrants arrive

But it rarely sees
what they carried here invisibly:

The funerals they missed
The mothers they could not hold again
The fathers who grew old
in photographs

There are people in this country
who have spent decades
loving their homeland from afar
like one mourns someone still alive
but impossibly unreachable

That is exile

Not politics
Not headlines

Exile is waking up some mornings
unable to explain
why your heart aches
for a street that no longer exists
the way you remember it

And still
They build
They work
They love this country too

Because gratitude and grief
can live inside the same body

Because human beings
are capable of carrying
two homes at once

The one that made them
and the one that finally allowed them
to dream without fear