Nahom first understood freedom while standing in freezing water.

Many years later, standing knee-deep in the chilly current of the Elbow River, he would look up and remember the first Canadian sky, vast and pale, stretching above him like the gaze of a distant god. That sky had watched his twenty-year exile with indifference, and now freedom stood where it always had—visible, untouchable, unseeing.

The flight to Toronto Pearson had lasted eighteen hours, but it felt longer inside his body. His knees ached. His shoulders stayed tense. When his battered suitcase finally appeared on the carousel, he grabbed it as if the airport itself might vanish. Airports had always meant questions, suspicion, rejection. He pushed forward anyway.

Behind the counter sat a woman with eyes the colour of winter fog. She studied his passport, then spoke the words that had followed him across borders and camps.

“Refugee from Eritrea.”

Then, for the first time in twenty years, she added, “Welcome to Canada.”

The word landed strangely, like water offered to someone who had forgotten how to swallow. Memories rose against it—guards waving him back, silent fingers pointing him aside, boots and rifles deciding his worth. Still, when the papers slid across the counter, simple and final, his hand hovered in disbelief.

Outside, his hands shaking, he lit a cigarette. Smoke filled his lungs, not just habit but proof. The sky above him was impossibly blue, a colour he had forgotten existed. For the first time, it did not feel forbidden.

It was the kind of sky his mother would have loved.