5560 miles

At the moment when my professional life has never been moving more full steam ahead, my personal life has never felt so stalled. 5,560 miles. 1 continent. 1 ocean. 9 time zones. Nicolas and I have been separated by a seemingly unbeatable bureaucratic monster which may or may not slowly amble towards my application to sponsor his green card, in between all the hateful anti-immigrant noise spewed from the highest levels of my nation's government. Sometimes I'm tempted to create a Twitter account just to rant or attempt to cajole my way to a quicker processing time with photos of my husband as a blond-haired blue-eyed child. We want more people who look like they come from Norway, right? But then the fact that these ugly thoughts even pass through my mind make me angry. Seriously, though, what does my government achieve through the forcible separation of spouses for more than a year? Why should my government, in a nation founded by immigrants, take the baseline assumption that any foreigner is probably a terrorist unless proven otherwise? And why don't I have more rights as a US citizen to introduce one new person into my country of 325 million? It's maddening. It's crushing. It's overwhelming.

The page which I refresh daily, taunting me in its unchanging status.

We signed our marriage contract nearly a year ago—not even a year? Sometimes it feels like a lifetime—and we meant what we said when we spoke those vows, for better or worse. We've been slowly growing into this new life, and finding little tricks to make it easier. For instance, my new habit of staking out a call room at work for a 10-15 minute "coffee break" after lunch means that hearing each other's voices is no longer a weekend-specific activity. Getting a few pay checks under the belt has also lightened the burden, as our freshly booked travel gives us real dates to hold on to, turning dreams and uncertainties into concrete plans on which we can focus our collective energies.

The travel bookings that are our life lines for 2018

When you know you'll have a total of 28 days together out 365 (but who's counting?), you have to make each count. So, to the extent our budget allows it, I'm trying to dream up fantastic adventures for us to share. In two weeks, when we celebrate our first wedding anniversary together, it'll probably mostly involve vegging out, with perhaps a quick trip down to my beloved Burgundian wine country. But then we're looking forward to August, when we'll have a week-long escapade across Bulgaria, a country we've needed to visit since Nicolas raved about his travels there on our first date and I told him how jealous I was, having spent years studying the language while dating a Bulgarian without ever having had the chance to see the place. You'd best believe I've put all my old Learn Bulgarian podcasts back into my phone. After that, I'm pretty sure that Thanksgiving weekend calls for a tasting menu in the Jules Verne, just the restaurant perched atop the Eiffel Tower. And then comes the undisclosed Christmas adventure. As of this past weekend, my trans-Atlantic is all set. (Can you believe it only cost me $520 for a direct flight from SF to Paris over the Christmas season?! That's what happens when you book your Christmas flight in March. I know, it's insane, but perhaps that's the insanity required to survive an intercontinental marriage.) We're just waiting on Nicolas's work to approve some dates before we can plan the onward journey from Paris. I'm thinking it's time for us to venture into sub-Saharan Africa... but let's leave that a surprise for now.

I'd love to close this post out with some neatly tied ends, but that's a luxury my government hasn't afforded me. I don't know when my life partner, the love of my life, my husband, will have the right to step foot inside my own country. And while we wait, multiple lawyers have advised us that he does not even have the right to enter the US as a tourist. It's a cruel and ugly side of my country that I didn't know existed. It makes me feel betrayed by the first place I ever called home. It sucks. Next time you hear anti-immigrant rhetoric spewed across the airwaves, think of us. And know that we are one of tens of thousands of couples stuck in limbo, wishing our government would respect us and our marriages just a little bit more, as green card wait times for spouses ever increase and our leaders rant against those evil foreigners.