Seven years.
There are murderers who serve less time.
My prison didn’t have bars. It had application numbers, expiry dates, automated emails, and government webpages written in that peculiar bureaucratic dialect where nothing is ever wrong. Everything is simply in progress.
Seven years in progress.
You learn strange habits when your future belongs to strangers.
You memorize expiry dates. Check portals at three in the morning. An email notification stops your heart before you’ve even unlocked your phone.
Eventually you understand the ugliest part.
The machine doesn’t hate you.
It doesn’t have to.
Indifference works just as well.
Somewhere, my entire existence was sitting in a queue. Seven years of education, work, friendships, and everything I’d built reduced to PDFs under a case number.
And behind me was Iran.
The country where I was born. The country you’re supposed to call home even when the word starts sounding like a threat.
Then January came.
People poured into the streets carrying the dangerous belief that their lives belonged to them.
The answer came in blood.
Faces became photographs. Names became numbers. Families waited outside prisons. And somewhere, an executioner’s rope waited more efficiently than any immigration system ever had.
I watched it all from Canada.
“Safe.”
I hated that word.
Safety shouldn’t come with an expiry date.
Because buried underneath every delayed application was the same quiet possibility:
Go back.
For someone else, maybe that means packing boxes.
For me, it could mean an interrogation room. A prison cell. A courtroom. An execution.
And still the portal said:
In progress.
History moved faster than my application.
People could be arrested faster. Sentenced faster. Killed faster.
I had done everything immigrants are told to do. Study. Work. Contribute. Follow the rules. Build a life.
Become everything except certain that I would be allowed to keep it.
Seven years ago, I thought immigration was about finding a new home.
I understand it differently now.
Sometimes immigration is standing outside a locked door while the house behind you burns.
You knock.
You wait.
The smoke gets thicker.
You can hear people screaming behind you.
You knock again.
And from the other side of the door comes the calmest voice imaginable:
Your application is in progress.
So you stand there.
The house keeps burning.
The door stays closed.
Seven years.
Still knocking.
