by Zebo Zukhriddinova
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AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.
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I want to speak loud enough for the child who
packed a suitcase bigger than their arms,
for the teenager who learned the word visa before
they learned how to drive,
for the mother who ironed hope into a shirt at 3 a.m. before a
flight that smelled like goodbye.
I want to speak the way drums speak in a stadium,
the way a voice echoes under bright lights like it refuses to
disappear,
the way someone stands at a microphone and
says:
we are still here.
We did not leave because we hated home.
We left because we loved it too much
to watch it close its doors on our
future.
We left because dreams were heavier than fear,
because opportunity whispered louder
than
comfort,
because sometimes survival is not dramatic—
it is paperwork, it is embassy lines, it is a number blinking above a
counter
where someone decides if your life may continue.
We learned how to pronounce ourselves again.
We learned that “Where are you from?” can be
curiosity
or it can be a cage.
We learned to laugh at jokes about our accents
while secretly holding our language like a fragile heirloom
we refuse to drop.
They say immigrant like it is a shadow.
Like it is something that sneaks.
Like it is something that takes.
But we are not shadows—
we are sunrise workers, late-night students,
we are the hands that build and the minds that
innovate,
we are the children who translate bills at the
kitchen table
while finishing homework about a history that forgot to mention us.
We crossed oceans, yes—
but mostly we crossed versions of ourselves.
We crossed from who we were told to be
into who we dared to imagine.
And if you ask what we carried,
it was not just luggage.
We carried recipes memorized by heart.
We carried songs our grandmothers hummed
while sweeping.
We carried photographs folded at the corners
from being opened too often in dorm
rooms
where homesickness sounds like
silence.
We carried love.
Love stronger than border walls.
Love louder than speeches soaked in fear.
Love stubborn enough to bloom in foreign winters
and call it spring.
Because hate is loud—
it chants, it points, it builds fences out of words —
but love is louder in the long run.
Love studies for exams in a second language.
Love sends money back home.
Love stands in graduation gowns and whispers,
“We made it.”
To the ones who left young—
who traded playgrounds for airports,
who learned currency exchange before algebra,
who grew up between time zones—
this is for you.
You are not “temporary.”
You are not “other.”
You are not a debate.
You are the proof
that hope can pack a suitcase
and still make room for courage.
And one day, when they ask what immigration
looks like,
tell them it looks like a child refusing to shrink their dream
to fit inside a border.
Tell them it looks like love
walking through customs
with nothing to declare
except a future.
Zebo Zukhriddinova is an international student currently studying in the United Kingdom.
