Exile, As Inherited

Some people are born into a home. I was born into the absence of one. I grew up far from the valley my parents describe with a certainty that makes distance feel temporary, as if the place still waits for us just a few roads away. My grandparents do not dwell on the night they left. They speak instead about the ordinary life that ended mid-routine: work postponed indefinitely, conversations left unfinished. For them, displacement was not travel. It was severance. And here I am, the generation raised in the in-between, the one who didn't witness the rupture but feels responsible for the repair. I am not only inheriting their sorrow. I am inheriting their correctness. Their exile did not nullify our belonging. If the story is told incorrectly, I must correct it.