The Sky I Took With Me

I sit in a circle of voices.

Each story begins softly,

but soon the room fills with the weight of memory.

One woman speaks of her grandmother’s kitchen

the smell of bread rising,

her hands folding love into the dough.

I can almost taste it,

warm and alive,

a recipe carried across oceans.

A man remembers a courtyard,

where cousins chased kites into the sky.

Their laughter rose higher than rooftops,

higher than fear,

higher than the silence that followed when the courtyard was gone.

Another voice trembles as he describes a chipped cup,

always filled with tea,

its rim worn smooth by years of use.

He says it was his father’s,

and though the cup is gone,

The memory still holds warmth.

I listen, and each story becomes a lantern.

A lullaby sung in a language I do not know,

a door painted blue that no longer opens,

a festival of lanterns glowing against the dark.

Pieces of home, laid gently in the circle like offerings.

And as I listen,

I feel my own fragments stir.

The smell of rice steaming,

the sound of slippers on cool floors,

the laughter that once filled my evenings.

I had tucked them away,

but their stories remind me

home is not lost when we leave.

It travels in fragments,

in rituals,

in the courage to remember.

Together, our voices weave a quilt of belonging.

Each patch different

spices, songs, courtyards, prayers

but stitched with the same thread

love that refuses to fade.

I came to hear their pieces of home,

but I leave carrying them too.

The sky they took with them

now stretches above me,

and I know

home is not one place.

It is every place our hearts insist on remembering.

It is the sky we all carry,

and the sky that will always remain.

-By Sanjana Saroha