WE CROSSED

by Zebo Zukhriddinova 

 

 

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

 

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.

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