Where the Earth Meets Her Name

Burnt out, Amina walks into the wild seeking peace, and finds a place that knows her name.

The road shimmered beneath the morning sun like a scar that had never fully healed. Amina stood at its edge, where the cracked asphalt gave way to volcanic stone and dust, her boots gathering red earth with each hesitant weight shift. Behind her, the town of Dambara was barely a memory: just a suggestion of rooftops and satellite dishes clinging to rusted poles. Ahead, the Batu Plains stretched wide and wild, breathless with heat and silence.
Her backpack sagged with the weight of things she no longer needed: a compass, though she didn’t care much for direction; a notebook, mostly empty; a change of clothes, simple and wrinkled. No phone. No maps. No schedule. Just the road and her own stubborn resolve.
She looked to the horizon, where the outline of the Gidan Rafi Ridge rose like the bent spine of some ancient animal. Somewhere beyond that ridge was a village her grandfather once called home, a place she’d never seen but somehow believed could still recognize her.
The breeze carried the scent of iron-rich soil and thornbrush, dry and sweet like old memory. She breathed it in and let her shoulders fall.
“I thought success was speed,” she murmured aloud, voice catching in her throat. “But peace has always walked slowly.”
She stepped forward.
The road didn’t greet her. It didn’t care who she was or why she had come. But the sky shifted slightly, as if to acknowledge that something had begun. And that was enough.
She paused by the edge of the trail, flipped open her notebook. Between blank pages was a single torn sheet, one she didn’t recognize.
You always said the land speaks last. I finally believe you.
No name. No date. Not in her handwriting.
She frowned, turned it over. Blank. Had someone slipped it in? Had she written it herself and forgotten? It unsettled her in a way the silence hadn’t, as if someone else had already started this journey, and she was just catching up.
Kilaki City had always been too fast for poetry. Billboards changed before the glue dried, honking never stopped, and people spoke in shortcuts: text, pitch decks, strategy calls. Amina used to love it. At twenty-three, she wrote jingles that got stuck in people’s heads and slogans that sold millions. She was sharp, quick, the agency’s rising star.
But somewhere along the line, the language blurred. Her sentences became scaffolding, not song. Clients wanted clever, never quiet. They wanted noise, never nuance. And after a while, she forgot how to write anything that didn’t sell.
Her apartment overlooked the Third Ring Expressway, and most nights she fell asleep to the glow of brake lights reflected on her ceiling. The city never slept, and neither did her mind. By twenty-eight, her doctor warned her about her heart. By twenty-nine, her boyfriend ended things with a note: You never stop talking, but I don’t know what you’re saying anymore.
It wasn’t cruel. It was just true.
Amina had stopped making sense to herself too.
The night she packed her bags, she left behind the awards, the leather notebooks filled with half-written poems, and a drawer full of prescription sleep aids. She kept only what felt light enough to carry and meaningful enough to need: her grandfather’s compass, her notebook, and a name she wasn’t sure belonged to her anymore.
She had never been to Gidan Rafi. Her mother barely spoke of it, except to mention it was where her father, Amina’s grandfather, had “walked into the hills one day and never came back down.” Some said he died. Others whispered he simply chose to vanish into silence. Amina didn’t know which version was true. All she knew was that something inside her tugged in that direction, not to find him, but maybe to find what made him stay.
She left Kilaki without ceremony. No farewell post, no out-of-office reply. Just a bus to Dambara. And then her feet.
The sun climbed higher, and Amina followed the road until it thinned into gravel, then dirt, then something like memory: vague and brittle, barely there. She crossed the Kura Rocks by noon, where twisted boulders jutted like the bones of sleeping giants. The heat pressed down like a hand on her back, but she didn’t mind. Sweat was simpler than stress. Pain was cleaner than numbness.
By the time she reached a dry streambed, her calves were aching, but her notebook had its first lines again:
The road is not a question, not an answer.
Just something that waits while you decide to be honest.
She didn’t even remember writing it. It came between steps, in rhythm with breath.
Past the rocks, the landscape opened into scrubland. The Batu Plains stretched wide around her, and the noise in her chest, the constant inner critique, started to lose its grip. Thorn trees bowed in the wind. The silence was no longer empty; it was complete.
At a fork in the trail, she paused. Her compass spun lazily. She took the left path, not because she knew, but because her body leaned that way.
The old man sat beneath a neem tree, shaping a shoe from wood. His knife moved steadily, the shavings falling onto the sand like whispers. He looked up and nodded, gesturing to a flat rock nearby.
“You look like someone who needs to sit without asking permission,” he said.
She sat.
He introduced himself as Garba. Said he used to be a cobbler in Kilaki, the same city, but a different pace.
“Back then, I made shoes for people in a hurry. Now I carve for people who take their time. Or who don’t know what time means yet.”
He handed her roasted groundnuts wrapped in newspaper. They chewed in silence.
“You came looking for something?” he asked.
“Peace.”
He chuckled. “Peace isn’t something you find. It’s what’s left when you stop lying.”
“I’m not.”
“Everyone is,” he said. “The question is whether you know what you’re lying about.”
The words stung, because they were true.
Before she left, he handed her the unfinished sandal. “Not to wear. Just to carry,” he said. “To remind you, some things are worth making slowly.”
Near Moroa, she came upon a woman planting saplings. Each had a name carved on a wooden tag. Not names of people lost, but people forgiven.
“That one is my sister. This one, my old boss. That tall one is for the woman who took my husband.”
“You named a tree after her?”
“Forgiveness isn’t softness. Sometimes it’s fire.”
Amina offered to help dig. Temi handed her a spade.
They planted in silence. That night, Temi gave her a seed wrapped in cloth. “You don’t have to plant it now,” she said. “But one day, you’ll know where it belongs.”
By twilight, Amina climbed to a ridge high above the land. She made camp, lit a small fire, and opened her notebook. The words came freely, raw and fast.
She wrote about her voice, how it had always been called “too loud,” “too much.” How she tried to shrink it. How it still lived.
She lay beside the fire. Sleep took her gently.
Her grandfather came in a dream, standing under a guava tree.
“The land remembers who walks it with truth,” he said. “If you listen, it will speak your name back to you.”
She woke in the hush before dawn. The compass twitched, then pointed north.
Not loudly. Just clearly.
She smiled.
By morning, the village of Gidan Rafi came into view: stone houses, low walls, children laughing in the distance.
She walked into the heart of the village, dust on her boots, silence in her steps.
Outside a small community center, a girl sat cross-legged, reading aloud.
Amina froze.
The words were hers.
Half-remembered, slightly misquoted, but hers.
“We found it in a book someone left here,” the girl said, glancing up. “No name. But I think whoever wrote it meant to come back.”
Amina sat without a word.
That night, she buried the seed from Temi near the edge of the ridge. She placed Garba’s sandal beside it.
Then she whispered her name, not loudly, not shyly. Just clearly.
The wind answered.
She walked into the place where the earth finally called her by name, and she answered not as someone returning, but someone arriving.

Word count: 3,529 words