By Asiyah Sultana

Risk is subjective, and love weighs leaving as a greater loss than living in danger.

An unstoppable force cannot coexist with an immovable object. One must give.

When a nuclear reactor explodes, a horrific scene unfolds. Firestorm blossoms bright against darkness, streaks of electric blue light snaking through the sky. Radioactivity penetrates the surrounding areas, contaminating hometowns.

Within days, the bordering neighborhoods are evacuated. Families say goodbyes to the homes that held late-night laughter and proof of love. Routines of playing in backyards and exchanging small talk over dinner will now be cemented in history. It will not be long until these cities will be ghost towns. Vacant ferris wheels and playgrounds will remain suspended in time forever, the only proof of the humanity that once resided there.

The tragedy is etched into memory: The explosion and the aftermath, the evacuation and the emptiness. It is the closing chapter to a once beautiful story: residents leaving behind the community they loved.

The force of radiation is unstoppable; it wins. It has destroyed hometowns, and humans have no option but to move.

That is the end; it cannot be rewritten.

-

I do not dread saying goodbye to home.

I spent my childhood excitedly counting down the days until college move-in day, the deadline that would mark my saving. I was exhausted of the same criticisms that echoed throughout my house. That my personality was too loud for dinner parties, my clumsiness improper. My lovers were not the ones approved of by my parents, my heart closing off each time I walked through the front door. My religiosity was unstable instead of strong, my clothing too colorful instead of modest.

Home was too small to hold me, so I relished in visions of a new place. When that day did come, blazing August heat beating on me as I hauled belongings to my dorm, I thought I had finally gotten it right. I did not mind the strain in my arms or the ache of my sunbaked skin. Instead, with each box I picked up, I felt lighter and lighter.

And yet, mere months later, the heartache found me again. It sank back in as the bus neared my hometown, taking me back for the holidays. It was my first time returning. Until then, it had not occurred to me that I was not truly free of home’s force.

I pressed my head to the cold glass of the window as the same sight greeted me: my balmy suburb tucked halfway between the airport and amusement park, every coffee shop and motel the same as it was five years ago. I watched the same streets flash through my vision in streaks of muted color, and suddenly I felt the same as I did five years ago too.

I closed my eyes and tried to picture small droplets of joy — : walks around the cul-de-sac after dinner, my neighbors’ Christmas lights pressing color into the early night. Skinned knees and popsicle stains dotting curbsides, evenings tinted tangerine skin orange, childhood friends, the remnants of radiance, disintegrated permanently now.

The memories were beautiful, yet they offered no comfort. They were contaminated by trauma and conflict, and despite what I told myself, I knew coming back would never change circumstances.

The bus halted to a stop, and I began to worry. Was this my fate? The house I grew up in, the family I feel like an imposter around. P…perhaps I will die with it all. I ached to leave it for good, but that felt unthinkable.

My past called me back, and I was powerless against it. I had to answer it.

-

Weeks after the evacuation, a handful of older women do the unthinkable: return. They walk defiantly back to the villages that protected them, push back against the bars of barbed wire and the urges of government officials. These women self-settle in the exclusion zone. They do not see it as the grounds of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, something to be afraid of. They peer through the contamination and recognize the same charm of their ancestral ties, the motherland that nurtured them.

Outside, the rest of the world buzzes on. They pay no mind to the women thriving through radiating rainfall. Authorities give up on forcing them out and formulate a deal: that they will leave the women alone as long as they are above child-bearing age. The women get to stay.

Risk is subjective, and no danger measures up to the charm of home. Ten years living in safety is worth less than three years living close to what fuels the heart.

-

This past winter, years after the first return, I did not cry when I walked through the front door. I slipped into my old bed and finally did not feel 15 again.

Over dinner one night, my mom made a throwaway comment about my lack of religiosity. Her words were barely a whisper, and yet, it revealed to me a truth I had been too scared to face. This place would only continue to cage me. It would never match who I wanted to be. I had to chase that person myself.

With that finality, I felt a new fight blaze in my bones. I did not respond to her, but a new promise bloomed in my mind:, that my visits back home would dwindle down, fewer and further between. Someday, I will never have to return to this Texas suburb.

I passed that summer scrolling stock images of dazzling cities, each one burning brighter than the last. Nights brought dreams in colorful flashes, visions of wandering the world, no longer tied down by this house.

For too long, it threatened to stand in my way, but I will not let it be immovable. I will not let it rewrite my destiny.

I could never identify whether bravery lied in staying or running, if it is more admirable to leave or return. As I piece together my future, I find it is neither. I see the greatest strength in persistence, in defiance in the face of being told where to go.

That persistence drives humanity, and I find it again when working on the first major grade of my spring semester, a report on the disaster of Chernobyl. In my frantic research on technological failure, I stumbled across a quiet fragment of history: a documentary about elderly women that returned. Motherland called to them in the face of chaos. It is their revolution, their personal resistance.

I am still in search of that everlasting, persisting thing. I burn to find it, to live a life that calls me so strongly I defy every other force to hold on to it.

-

Years after destruction struck Chernobyl, this remains, the spirit of a scattered sisterhood. The immovable objects: old women throwing together meals from well-tended farmland, humming the same stories and songs under their breath.

They took extraordinary measures to carry on with their ordinary lives, aware yet not frightful that they linger on contaminated Earth. Their husbands die off; their old neighbors wander through a new world they will never encounter, and still they persist.

Radiation is terrifying, but not worse than dying with the wrong fate.

They were told this place was unsafe to ever return to, but they did not listen to law. Against such a powerful force, they remained immovable. They crafted their own destiny. ■