A Bridge Made of Hope

Sometimes the steps we take shape our future. And sometimes, we walk blindly, stumbling along a road we don’t understand. Only time, like a stern judge, whispers years later: “This is why it happened.”

Now I live far from home. Far from the mountains, from the bustling bazaars, from the voices that warmed me all my life. Here, the streets smell of coffee and fresh baguettes. Here, people smile differently, even their silence feels foreign. Yet deep inside, beneath all this quiet strangeness, my true home still breathes — with the bitter taste of kumis, with the wind that smells of endless steppe, with the hum of markets at dawn.

I often think about how much I want to return to where everything feels like me. But for now, that’s impossible. Fate placed a long, rocky road between me and my homeland. And I walked it for one reason for her. My daughter.

We waited for her for so long. So long that waiting became a prayer. After two sons, we had only one dream: a daughter. A little girl, delicate as spring light. I did everything to bring her closer.

“Another doll?” my husband would smile when I placed yet another porcelain beauty on the shelf.

“Yes,” I’d reply with a soft laugh. “So, she knows we’re waiting.”

He would come closer, wrap his arm around my shoulders, and whisper with quiet hope:

“She’ll come. I know she will.”

We traveled to sacred places. I pleaded with the mountains, the wind, the rivers: “Give me a daughter.” In spring, I went to kumis therapy. They said it renews the blood, gives life. I drank mare’s milk — sharp, earthy, as bitter as destiny itself. I breathed the steppe air, listened to the silence, to the winds singing above the hills. Out there, among the grasses and the smell of yurts, I believed: a miracle is possible.

I remember a woman I met at a child development course where I took my son. She told me:

“Go in the spring. It worked for me.”

And I went. And I believed. Sometimes, faith smells like grass and milk.

And then she came. Our girl. Long-awaited, like rain after drought. We gave her a name that sounded like a tender prayer. I looked at her and thought: every doll, every whisper, every journey all for this moment.

But life didn’t leave us in peace. It seemed to ask:

“Do you want a future for your daughter? Pay the price.”

And we paid with the life we knew. We left. First Lebanon. I learned to listen to a sea that wasn’t mine. Then Italy a stop before leaping into the unknown. And then France. Lyon. Old bridges, gray rooftops, the smell of coffee in the morning.

“Will we manage?” I asked one night, when the suitcases were already packed.

He gripped my hand tightly:

“For her? We will.”

We started from zero. No family, no familiar language, no certainty about tomorrow. Sometimes I wanted to scream: “Enough!” But then I looked at my daughter. Fifteen now. Laughing in French, dreaming big, building her future. And I knew: everything was for her.

At night, when everyone is asleep, I close my eyes and see home. The market’s lively hum, the smell of fresh bread, mountains on the horizon. Sometimes I dream I’m walking down my street, and then I wake to foreign walls, to the distant sound of a tram. A lump in my throat, and a warm thought: one day I will return.

Maybe it was all meant to be. Maybe my daughter was born for a reason. Perhaps she is our bridge to the future. And I will walk that bridge, no matter how long or narrow.

Because sometimes, the steps you take define your life. And sometimes, they simply give you one more chance to prove: you can keep walking.