Where the Soil Still Calls My Name

Where the Soil Still Calls My Name

In exile, he found comfort—but never home.

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I. The Departure That Wasn’t a Choice

He left the village before the first birds sang. Not because he wanted to, but because the world outside had clawed its way into their land and made staying unbearable.

There were whispers first—of soldiers in the north, of burnt homes in the east, of children disappearing in the night. Then came the sound of boots, the blackened sky, and the hurried silence that falls when a people are told to forget who they are or face erasure.

Arif was only twenty-three, the youngest teacher in the valley’s only school. He had taught poetry and history, trying to remind the next generation where their hearts were rooted. But roots, it seemed, were dangerous.

“You have a choice,” they said, standing over his mother’s courtyard, the uniforms gleaming. “Stay, and silence yourself—or go, and live.”

He packed three books, a small satchel of dried mulberries, and the scarf his grandmother had woven before she died.

And he left.

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II. The Quiet of Elsewhere

The new country was quiet in a strange way.

No one asked where he was from, because they were afraid of what they might hear. He worked in kitchens and slept in a room the size of memory. He didn’t speak much, afraid his accent might betray him. But in the early hours, when the city was asleep and no eyes pressed against his skin, he wrote.

He wrote letters to his village, knowing no one would read them.

> “Dear soil,

I remember the way you held the scent of rain. Do you remember my feet?

I hope the trees still bloom without names.”

Time did not heal. It disguised. He became another shadow among many—another immigrant with a story no one asked for, and grief too fragile to shout.

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III. A Voice Beneath the Skin

It had been ten years since he saw the mountains. Ten years since he tasted the bread baked on stone.

On his thirty-third birthday, he visited a museum. There was a small exhibit on “forgotten homelands,” curated with photographs of places that no longer existed as they once had. Ruins of towns, names erased from maps, stories recorded only in dusty journals.

There was a picture.

A grainy black-and-white photo of a school in the valley—his school. The broken windows, the faded sign still carrying the first letter of his language.

He stood still for so long a guard came to ask if he was alright.

“I’m from there,” he whispered.

The guard blinked. “From where?”

Arif looked at the photograph again.

“I don’t know anymore.”

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IV. Ghosts That Walk in Sunlight

Memories aren’t polite. They don’t knock before entering. They flood.

He began seeing them again—his students, their curious faces. His mother standing in the doorway with that old sadness in her eyes. The river that once sang its lullabies beside the village.

He began dreaming in his old language. Words he hadn’t used in years returned with cruel clarity.

One night, he found an old cassette tape in a second-hand store. The label said simply: “Field recordings—unknown region.”

He played it, and the air filled with the sound of wind chimes, roosters, distant laughter, and a woman singing a lullaby in his language. His knees gave in.

He wept until morning.

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V. Letters to a Land That Might Forget

Arif began writing again—not just letters, but essays, poems, stories of the land that had birthed him and burned him in equal measure. He started a blog, anonymous at first, but soon his words spread among those who understood.

Other exiles wrote back.

A woman in Canada who hadn’t seen her village in forty years.

A man in Istanbul who carved memories into wood.

A boy in Paris who was learning his grandmother’s alphabet from scratch.

The homeland lived in their bones. In songs hummed while cooking. In the instinct to bow before mountains. In the aching when certain flowers bloomed.

One message read:

> “I’ve never been to the land you describe, but I know it. It lives behind my ribs too.”

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VI. The Return

Years later, when the war was no longer news and the new regime had grown comfortable, travelers were allowed back—if they had the right papers and the right silence.

Arif returned.

The road was not as he remembered it. The checkpoint was a wound. But he crossed it.

He walked for an hour until he stood where his village had once stood.

Now it was a field.

No houses. No school. Just scattered stones and the stubborn echo of history.

He sat on the earth. Closed his eyes. Dug his fingers into the soil.

And whispered.

> “I came back.

Even if you are dust, I came back.

Even if you forgot my name—I remember yours.”

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VII. What the Soil Said

That night, he dreamed of the village—not as it was, but as it might have been.

Children ran barefoot across the grass. His mother poured tea in the courtyard. The river still sang.

And the soil?

It said:

> “You were never gone.

We carried you,

as you carried us.”