A City That Doesn't Know My Name
私の名を知らない街
The train doors opened onto a platform that smelled of cold metal and strangers.
Clutching her papers against her chest, Amara stepped down into the grey afternoon.
The city of Halden, which she had only seen in photographs, felt impossibly large.
Signs she could not read hung above every door, promising things she could not name.
Behind her lay a country that no longer existed in the shape she remembered.
She had left in a hurry, carrying two bags and a name that fit no mouth here.
An officer at the desk looked at her passport, frowning at the letters he could not sound out.
He said her name aloud, and it came out broken, a word cut in half.
Amara nodded anyway, because correcting a stranger felt like a battle she could not win.
Outside, the wind carried a language whose rhythm meant nothing to her tired ears.
People moved past her quickly, wrapped in coats and in lives that already had shape.
Standing still on the corner, she realised that no one here was waiting for her.
A woman selling bread pointed her toward a that took in new arrivals.
The room she was given had one bed, one window, and walls the colour of old paper.
Sitting on the thin mattress, she took out a photograph she had saved from the fire.
It showed a house, a garden, and faces that the war had scattered across the earth.
She whispered her own name softly, the way her mother used to call her home.
In this city, that sound belonged to no one, echoing against a language it did not share.
The map on the wall showed streets whose names she could not yet .
Every corner seemed to ask a question that her few phrases could not answer.
She had crossed borders, rivers, and years, only to arrive as a person without a word.
Yet somewhere beneath the fear, a small hope refused to lie down.
Tomorrow she would learn ten words, and the day after, ten more, she promised herself.
A city that did not know her name would, in time, be taught to say it.
She turned off the light, and the darkness, at least, spoke a language she understood.
Somewhere in that silence, a new life was quietly deciding where to begin.