He moved for all the right reasons. A better job. A cleaner city. A future with more possibilities. The kind of place people dream of—quiet streets, efficient trains, polite nods exchanged without the burden of conversation.
But some nights, it was the silence that hurt.
Not the kind outside. The kind inside.
Back home, everything had a sound. The clatter of dishes in a crowded kitchen. The crackle of a radio playing songs that never made it out of the country. Laughter that started loud and always got louder. Language spoken with your hands, with your eyes, with the whole of you.
Now, everything felt muted. Clean. Distant.
Even his own voice sounded different when he spoke here. Like it had been flattened, pressed into something smaller. More acceptable.
Some days, he’d cook. Not because he was hungry, but because memory lives in scent. The sharpness of garlic, the warmth of cinnamon, the way oil pops in a pan like firecrackers. He’d open the windows and let the spices drift out, pretending they might reach someone who understood.
Other days, he’d walk to a part of town where a tiny shop sold ingredients from back home—jarred sauces, dried herbs in plastic bags with faded labels, tea in dusty tins. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.
Enough to feel tethered.
He didn’t regret leaving. But he never expected that missing your culture would feel less like longing and more like erosion. A slow fading. A question whispered in the quiet moments:
What parts of you vanish when no one else sees them?
He hadn’t found the answer.
But he held on to what he could. A phrase. A recipe. A childhood song hummed under his breath while washing dishes.
And that was something.
That was still home.
life 
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