So, I'm still working on actually posting every day but here I am. A couple times a week at least, trying to figure out what it is that I want to show with this writing project. At times, it's an ode to the beauty that is my relationship with my cousin, Monica. Others, it's a story of the Latin American immigrant family struggle. The difficulty of family tiffs, the incompatibility of cultures, and the reverse culture shock that comes with being denied a life in the United States. However, we'll see what I actually end up depicting. This is what I worked on this week.
"Miss?" I looked up and the line had moved four feet. “sola?” I stuttered, “Uh, sí, I'm alone.” I thought of how weird that sounded. She pointed to her left and I approached another line. I felt like I was in a house of mirrors where every exit lead you into the room you had just left, or wasn’t an exit at all. After repeating this process three times I finally stood in front of the window for my interview, behind a blonde white woman with a different colored passport than mine, hers red, mine brown. She crossed her legs at the knee while standing with the phone to her ear, speaking to her interviewer.
They spoke for a long time and I shifted my weight from one leg to the other thinking of what David was doing while waiting for me. In the line to my right, waiting for another window, was a group of young men, probably between 18 and 22, who were joking around with each other and seemed like they could, at any moment, start to jump and push each other around, like at a pre-teen punk concert. On my left, a whole family stood just outside the line. The woman I took as the mother held a small child and rocked him from side to side, though his face was tranquil. Her eyebrows were folded in worry and she kept saying, “I don’t know, I don’t know why,” shaking her head. One of the officers approached them and told them that when their appointment had passed, they were to exit through the rear. They said nothing and made their way towards that door slowly, as if crossing that doorway would make their rejection definite. The girl in front of me leaned to her right to pick up the purse she had placed next to her feet during her appointment. She pulled it up to her right shoulder with great effort and walked away from the window looking frustrated, a white sheet of paper in her hand. At the same time, the group of boys in the other line walked away, high fiving each other.
I looked towards the window and waited for the nod from the diplomat to approach. As I came closer, he grabbed a pen and wrote, with his left hand, a tally on one of the two columns he had made on a sheet of paper in front of him. On his writing hand ring finger, a gold graduation ring glimmered. I picked up the phone.
