I Note
This story is a work of fiction, but it is built from truths that belong to many people the experience of leaving home young of growing up between worlds of maintaining identity across distance, of carrying love across time zones is not one story it is thousands of stories, lived by children and parents and aunties and friends who deserve to see themselves in pages.
To every child who has been the new one in the classroom your strangeness is not a deficit it is a library.
To every mother who has made the impossible choice to let go in order to give more: the love you put into that decision is not invisible. It echoes forward.
And to every Leroy who kept writing: your loyalty is the thing that makes the distance survivable.
Home is not only where you were born it is what you build with everything you've learned, wherever you've learned it.
— End —