Going home

Millennial nostalgia, botched family vacations and being a "bad" teen

Lawson and I on a trip to Florence in 2011. Everyone thought we were a couple. What are these glasses?

An assumption a lot of people make about UK immigration has been driving me bonkers lately. Whenever I’ve explained to someone or other that I have to go back to the US for a few weeks to get my biometrics done and temporarily surrender my passport, I’ve elicited more than one confused response: if you’re married to a British national, don’t you just get to live in England automatically?

The answer is no. Even if you’re married, even if you’re emigrating from a supposed global superpower, and even if your wife has worked for the UK government for 3-plus decades. You still have to spend lots of money and time on bullshit bureaucratic paperwork, proving both that your relationship is real (we’ve submitted the cruise story, lol) and that you won’t swindle British taxpayers by relying on public assistance. But we’re lucky. So, so lucky. I have white privilege, American privilege, and my age on my side. We have every reason to believe that I’ll return to the UK in late May with my visa in hand.

I don’t blame people for being confused—it’s intentionally, hellishly confusing. And it thoroughly bums me out, how hard and destabilizing this all is, especially since I’m living through the best case scenario. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Going through this process has only made me more passionately in favor of abolishing borders and granting freedom of movement to every human being.

I spent my first week back in the US at my aunt and uncle’s house in Connecticut, hanging out with my cousin Lawson, who was the only other person home. Everyone else, the dog included, was down in Florida.

I grew up a few minutes down the road in my grandfather’s house. But since my first semester of college, when my mother disinvited me from coming back to Grandpa’s (and Grandpa didn’t stop her), I’ve spent the various interstitial moments of my adult life coming home to my aunt and uncle’s, where they’ve so generously welcomed me ever since. I even have my own bedroom there, though it’s a guest room now, most of the time, as bedrooms belonging to adult children tend to be.