ANYTHING TO DECLARE? VOL. 07
Let’s begin with me turning into a weeping heap.
There is a scene about halfway through Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar in which Matthew McConaughey’s character, Cooper, is viewing video messages left by his family. Why? Cooper (spoiler alert) is on a secret exploration mission that is taking him further into space than any Earthling has gone and safely returned. His time in space has felt like weeks or months to him, but decades have passed on Earth. Cooper’s eyes shimmer, squint, tear up, and erupt into full-blown sobs while watching messages from his kids. His teenage son is suddenly a married father of two and his daughter, aged 10 when he left, is 33 and still traumatized by him choosing a space adventure over being present in her life. She all but tells him so via a grainy screen, her tears betraying the coldness she wanted to convey. At the end of the 4-minute scene, McConaughey’s Cooper is a shaking, emotional wreck.
And so was I.
In the wee hours of that same day, some 16 hours prior to going to the movie theater, I had spoken with my mother via Skype. I called at 4am Copenhagen time so that I would reach her at 7pm California time—when her workday was over and a bit of relaxation had been had and maybe my Dad was home, too. I, like Cooper, was familiar with space-time negotiations. At this particular point, I hadn’t been home in almost three years. Hadn’t hugged my mother or smelled her in almost three years. I’d seen my father once because I was able to meet him on an international trip my mother couldn’t join, but I was talking to her and not to him on this Skype. It was she who asked me, through my own grainy screen, when are you coming back? and mused I wonder when I’ll see you again. At one point she said, I never thought I wouldn’t see you for this long.
She didn’t guilt me the way Cooper’s daughter did—she has always been incredibly supportive of my decisions—but there was no denying that I’d chosen my own adventure over being in her life. And I, again like Cooper, had no idea when I’d be back. I didn’t have the money for a ticket home, and every opportunity to leave seemed to coincide with work picking up. When I watched that scene, replete with Danish subtitles underscoring my truth, I felt the weight of my absence for those I’d left. I recognized the pain and uncertainty I’d unearthed while doing something for my own benefit. I never thought that odd constellation of uncertainty, pain and benefit would prepare me for a pandemic six years in the future.
When Covid hit and those of us lucky enough to have safe homes were restricted to them, unsure of when we’d be able to be out and about freely, I had a faint sense of deja vu. When waiting for confirmation on an extension of my student visa, I was unable to leave the country and missed a friend’s wedding. It was in Sweden, less than an hour away by train. After sending in my application for a green card, I had no clue when a decision would be made on my fate. A friend asked if I wanted to go to a concert that was two months away. I responded: Yes I would surely like to, but I have no idea if I’ll still live here. It was months and months of I don’t know. A seemingly endless period of it’s out of my control. A time when my mobility and freedom were completely subject to the wishes of an unseeable governmental entity. There was no one to get mad at, really. All I could do was wait and hope that soon, soon I’d be able to say yes to a planned concert and move freely through the world, unafraid of getting stuck somewhere I wasn’t trying to be.
My green card approval took about seven months (a rather quick turnaround, as many other countries can take well over a year). The entire time was a high-stress, no-say-in-my-own-life rollercoaster. I could only tell myself that this difficult period was in service to something better on the other side. I had to think that the anxiety and struggle was an investment in a safer, improved future. That the short-term pain was worth the long-term benefit.
It surprised me to rediscover and flex these muscles in the time of Covid. I’d learned that circumstance is not something we create for ourselves, but simply something we find ourselves in. I had figured out how to develop a reserve of understanding and patience for living through amorphous, vague conditions of being. I had already lived with the knowledge that a sense of autonomy is not always included in a sense of safety. Sometimes we’re strapped into a rocketship, isolated from the ones we love, crying into screens, feeling foreign in our own minds and unsure of when we can truly be together again—but we do it because we have to. Because we feel deep, deep in our intuition that it is necessary, that it is a strategic move for an improved tomorrow, that there is a reward for this pain. We sob now to breathe freely later, envisioning the day we invite our loved ones into our homes and we both feel welcome there.
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This is the seventh of a 12-part mini-series exploring my experience with immigration. It is edited by Ann Friedman. Read the previous installments or sign up to get the rest of the volumes delivered directly to your inbox here.