Still, I Stay

—from the voice of a Syrian in exile

I have never stopped dreaming of the olive trees.
Even now,
in this camp of sand and plastic walls,
I see them when I close my eyes—
the way their shadows fell across my grandfather’s field
before everything cracked and scattered.

Home is a scent that never fades.
It lives in cardamom coffee,
in the dialect my daughter corrects me for,
in the lullabies my wife still sings
to a child who’s never heard the call to prayer
echo from our village mosque.

They say Assad is gone.
They say now is the time.
That we can go back.
But go back to what?

To rubble where our house once stood,
to streets that have forgotten our names,
to a job market that pays in promises,
to schools that exist only in memory,
to a future we cannot afford to rebuild.

My sons speak Turkish now,
my daughters count in Jordanian dinar.
They have outgrown the Syria
I still carry in my bones.
They ask me,
Baba, why would we leave what little we’ve made
for a country that does not know us?

I have no answer.
Only longing.
Only the ache of belonging to a land
that no longer has a place for me.

I want to return,
to plant a lemon tree where my brother died,
to sweep the dust from my mother’s doorstep,
to light a lamp in the window
so someone, someday, might know we came back.

But I also want my children
to have medicine,
and books,
and futures
not held together by barbed wire and waiting lists.

So, still, I stay.
Not because I do not love Syria,
but because love is not always enough
to make a life.

And in this exile,
where I have patched together dignity
with used tarpaulin and borrowed words,
I choose the known struggle
over the unknown silence.

They call us guests.
But this tent holds my family.
And until home becomes more than a ruin,
until return does not come at the cost of everything,
this exile will be my defiant act of hope.