I am here.
I am there.
I am nowhere.
I exist in the overlap.
A nomad of the terrestrial, I pace this earth as a stranger, forever an oblivious child building a sandcastle with quicksand.
Grief is my greatest power. It fills me with fire.
I was born crying, screaming, mourning the warm sanctuary of my mother’s womb before I had even tasted air.
The Gregorian marks me at twenty-five, my spirit carries the weight of generations.
I have stood witness as my civilization divided, my lands erased, and my history consigned to the tombs of the forgotten.
My first awakening was realizing I’m the Other.
It is written in the melanin of my skin, the spirals in my hair and the rolls of my tongue.
It lives in the faith I chose, the land of my ancestors, and what rests in between my limbs.
I am a deviation too profound to find harbor in any port, I do not belong here, there, or anywhere.
I have lived long far from the soil that birthed me.
I have been taught to feel in foreign languages.
My thoughts have been tuned to the frequencies of foreign lands.
I am forced to dream in a secondary dimension and speak through the filter of alien proverbs.
I have drifted far away from the sky that created me, I can no longer identify what is backwards.
Afloat, ashore, astray…
In the grey mundane, I search for an echo, a flicker of light, a phantom scent, or a vibration that tastes like the familiar.
The only world I know decreed my exile, peeling away the layers of my humanity until I became nothing but a cosmic trespasser.
I carry my homeland like a rumor in my bones
a soft insistence, a language that hums beneath my speech.
In waking hours, I am a citizen of the thresholds.
Every border I cross leaves a filament behind thin as spider silk.
I have learned to walk gently, so as not to tear them.
These fragile threads that bind me to what no longer binds me.
There are nights when the sky feels like an unanswered prayer,
vast and listening, but unwilling to speak my name.
On those nights, I invent constellations.
I stitch my past to my present with stars,
calling each one by the names I am no longer called.
I have asked the wind if it remembers me.
It answered by passing through.
Touching everything, keeping nothing.
There is wisdom in that, I think.
To belong everywhere lightly, and nowhere at all.
And yet, there is a stubborn root in me
that refuses such transcendence.
It aches for soil that recognizes me.
Sometimes I wonder if exile is loss or transformation.
A slow alchemy of identity.
A question with no fixed answers.
Who am I, when no land claims me?
Perhaps I am the echo between spaces,
a place where meaning gathers after departure.
Perhaps I am the pilgrimage itself,
the sacred act of moving without arriving.
If there is a home for me,
it may not be found on any map.
It may be this very searching.
This endless wandering
through the geography of the soul.
Léa El kouch
November 2026
Featured Image by Léa El kouch
