NUMB

I have been writing in this blog for a couple of years now. It has been interesting for me to put my experiences on paper; there is something about writing something down that makes me feel relief. It’s like I am a pressure cooker and I have all these steam inside and only writing it down will relieve the pressure.

I wish that all the practice I’ve had explaining my journey and my feelings throughout it could help me explain how it felt to open that envelope and find my Green Card in it. I could describe it as happiness, but I am not sure it was. It was a weird sense of “huh, what now?”

What now? I don’t know. I saw the Green Card and the badly taken picture on it (I had a cold the day of the Biometrics) and I wanted to jump up and down in happiness (which was the reaction I always pictured in my head when I dreamed of the moment) but I didn’t. DH and I looked at each other and felt an anticlimactic sort of joy. I guess I was expecting to feel an overwhelming sense of completion, after all a long awaited goal had finally been reached. I don’t know what was wrong with me, maybe it was all those Mai Tais, or all the Maui rum, or sun burned, or the ink in the tattoo had done something to me, I don’t know. All I know is that I felt as if I had a filter between the Green Card in my hand and me, it wasn’t touching me.

Where was the sense of overwhelming relief I was sure I was going to feel? Don’t get me wrong, I did feel relief, I felt free and like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. But where was the thrill? Where were the tears? The lifting happiness? The sense of accomplishment?  Why couldn’t I feel super happy as I had expected to feel? I felt oddly muted.

I called my mom and friends, and posted it on Facebook with many exclamation points. Everyone was happy and excited about the prospects of my future and how this was finally over.

Why couldn’t I feel anything? It was as if all my emotions had been felt and used up in Hawaii and I had no room for more. DH spent a sleepless night (he’s a worrier) thinking of all the things we could do now that I was free to be here. I can work anywhere I want, I can move to a different state, I can get a driver’s license, I can visit other countries, I can buy a house, I can go back to school. All those choices previously denied to me, now open. All the possibilities kept him turning and tossing while I slept like the dead next to him.

Words fail me, and believe me, it doesn’t happen often. If anything I suffer from a surplus of words and if something can be said in two words I manage to deliver it in a hundred of them. Why then do I fail to explain my feelings? I brought the GC to work and my coworkers hugged me, my boss was near tears, they felt so much, what the fuck is wrong with me? Why am I feeling so numb?

We had planned a party, when we were still waiting for the Green Card, DH and I had said we would throw a giant party and invite everyone and have a cake with a copy of my GC on it. We would hire a DJ and caterers and do it like we never did our wedding because we didn’t have the money then. My mom had bought DH an expensive cigar that I am sure she hoped he would smoke when he became a daddy (not happening); he instead had planned to smoke it as soon as the Green Card was in our hands.

The party hasn’t happened, the cigar remains un-smoked