It took a great deal of preparation (3 hours gathering official documents, old bills, financial statements, printing out photos and the like) and quite a little bit of waiting (our appointment was at 9 am, but on our lawyer’s advice we showed up at 8:15, only to be kept waiting until 10, but it went fast once we were there: our interview with the Immigration Services is now behind us.

Since Chris and I have been married less than 2 years, all it will get me is a conditional Green Card, but with it in my pocket, I can now work or live anywhere I want in the United States. This is one more step to that feeling of freedom I felt so deprived of when I was working for the employer that brought me here. Not that they treated me poorly in any way – on the contrary, they were quite good to me – but the knowledge was always there that they could take everything from me if they let me go. Without employment, I would have had no legal ground to stay in the country of the man I knew to be the one from me from very early on. A month to wait for this now, but I already have interim documents, so this should be just a formality.

In the waiting room, I was finished reading through Aeschylus’s Oresteia, which I will summarize here soon. It’s been a surprisingly enjoyable read, full of humor, at complete odds with my expectations of a dreary, verbose classic – though it certainly gets chatty at times. Reading the scene of Oreste’s judgment in Athens, which proclaims the prominence of the marriage bond (patriarchal) over the one of blood (matriarchal), was interestingly timely; that I had been so recently immersed in Kafka and his administrative world was equally amusing.

And this is why I love books. No matter when, or where, or what: they always fit.