Kumusha still matters even when you never go back — it's not a place anymore, it's a compass.

I left at nineteen and have returned exactly four times in the two decades since. My children have never seen the homestead where I grew up, and yet I find myself giving them directions to it anyway, as though the knowledge itself is the inheritance rather than the visit.

There's a temptation, in the diaspora, to treat kumusha as something that expires — a claim that weakens with every year of absence. I've come to believe the opposite. It doesn't weaken. It just changes shape, from a place you go to a place you carry, and hand down not as memory but as orientation.

You don't need to go back to know which way is home. You just need to still care which way that is.