Cost Of More

From the walls of a weathered home
From the ordinary streets of an unassuming town
Where you first learned to walk and talk —
From a dust-strewn neighbourhood
Of donkey carts and hawkers
From the tongue of your ancestors
From rooms with low ceilings

You strive, dreaming of larger worlds
Brighter places — unseen promises of more
Half a world away, you arrive
And find the same air — only gentler
The same sun — dimmed behind foreign clouds
The same earth — tamed and trimmed
Neater houses, paved streets
People moving, purposeful and quiet
Behind polite smiles and foreign tongues
For years you live, believing —
From scarcity to abundance
You have crossed — at last

One day, you look around —
No friends, no family
No neighbours who know your name
No voices that speak your tongue —
Years later, still an outsider

You wonder if you should return
To the land of childhood and youth
Where time has erased what you once knew
Or stay, a perpetual guest

What was it you sought —
In uprooting from an ordinary life
With enough air, sun, and earth
Enough food for the day

What did you gain in leaving
More money, perhaps —
Yet you still eat the same bread each day
Still sleep in the same six feet of space
Each night

You fled no war, escaped no famine
And yet you were pushed to migrate —
By an unseen oppressor
Aspiration, ambition
The hunger for more

Perhaps for your children’s future
Your family’s hope — you believed, you sacrificed
A better home, an education for them
Whether you left them behind
To grow without you
Or brought them along —
To seek, as you do —
Unbelonging either way

And while you searched
The streets you left behind grew hollow
The towns emptied of those who might have stayed
Until there was nothing left there
To return to

You — who might have made the place more —
Left, leaving it even less
For more, you became less

Not knowing the worth of less
And the cost of more

You leave home
Only to find a house
And lose the home you left behind