I was asleep the very first time I crossed an international border. Sometime between the thirteen hours of existing in a plane, I had gone past the Atlantic Ocean and into Europe, landing in France on a foggy and uncertain morning. I was rushed out of an airplane into the sterile no-land of airports, only to find security asking me if I had more money with me in that moment than the amount of money I had ever had in my whole life. Truth be told, I lied my way into Europe: asking a friend if I could use his bank statement with a notarized letter stating his money would take care of my rather expensive educational experience. Instead of renting or finding accommodation within the university dorms, I couchsurfed until a family agreed to take me in for a cheap rent. I did not try the amazing European cuisine but definitely ate enough McDonald’s for a lifetime. And even now, friends ask for tips on traveling tight, saying, “If you did it with two hundred, I could probably manage with a grand.” But in the very first moment of standing in a line with folders of paperwork that proved my legality, hands shaking and body in jet lagged shock, I kept re-reading the name printed on every paper making sure it was, still, the name stated as mine on my passport.

While in line for revision, I was not only unsure of what the next months would bring, but slightly terrified. A French border guard looked at me, asked me three questions in a French I had expected to grasp but slipped out of my recognition. My whole life I had an urge that seemed to only settle when I dreamed of Europe. The guard stared when I answered in a mix of English, Spanish, and French that was broken beyond any repair. I had done it right, had savings and took classes, beat everyone in every grade, and still, it was only on a lucky whim that I was actually there, in France. He stamped my passport and pointed the way to where a button would decide if I had to open my luggage or not. This was not the way I had imagined I would arrive in a different continent, but I was already there. It lit up red. I opened my suitcase, whose contents obviously scattered everywhere leaving on the floor of the airport an assortment of black dresses, Mexican candy, and a whole array of books.

Years later, it would feel like a betrayal when that passport expired and I had to go and get in a different line, in a different country, to get questions asked by a different face but, all in all, go through the same paperwork and bureaucracy here as anywhere to get a new one. There was an emotional relationship with the object but, most importantly, there was an emotional relationship with the stamps on that passport. When I got it back, pierced as to render it unusable, I saved it in the box where I kept other important emotional knick-knacks: train tickets, wrappers for different foods, love notes. I could not let go, for some reason, of the marks that stated in their rigorous blue ink that I had indeed been in Spain, France, and Italy. I had also been in Portugal but we got there on a cheap bus and nobody, ever, stopped to check that we were actually international students and not humans being trafficked to Lisbon.

I was nervous when going on to push the button. I still don’t understand statistics but I had seen so many people before me with their green passes that I instinctively crossed my fingers behind my back, hoping that the family before would get the red instead of me. But they didn’t, and I did. I think a loner is always somehow regarded as dangerous and I was a very young, underslept, Mexican female on her own, with a huge red spinner suitcase whose wheels did not spin. I thought it was natural to feel nervous going to push the button, but when I was pushing it, I wondered why. Had I been, then, more into conspiracy theories, or at least any more cynical, I would have thought I was targeted. But I was not and so my question in the moment was about the feeling and not the structure. It is not a natural fear, is it? I had never before been scared of lines or buttons, of not having money or of having it or of being alone; but I was scared then, my fingers leaving a sweaty mark on the button lighting up in front of me.

To unlock the rest of this essay, join the Circus! Click HERE to learn more.