The Long Wait

As you check your mail, you notice a letter that makes you stop in your tracks. You knew it was coming, of course you do, you’ve spent thousands of pounds and a great number of hours of your life dedicated to its creation. You’ve completed every checklist, every box ticked and form filled, now all that was left was for it to arrive. So here you are, crouched over in your porch way, pulling stuck letters from the letter box in your front door. The stairs too far for a perch, for fear that the seconds lost in the movement to sit or stand would be any more an unnecessary delay to when you could consume and confirm the contents of the long brown envelope.

It’s one of those special kind of envelopes, the kind where half of it is built with a cardboard backing to keep it straight, the kind that your degree, your postgrad, and your grandmother’s inheritance documents had arrived in. Stamped with ‘Do not bend’ and littered with a colourful shipping labels and variety of foreign and domestic postmarks. Upon closer inspection you find that the original seal has been broken, this would normally alarm you, but along the broken seam is tape adorned with the seal of the US customs and postal office. It confuses you for a moment, bewildering you why something that originated in Canada, would need to cross into the hands of the US customs office in its journey to you in the UK.

However, the passage of mail through North America and across the Atlantic is not your most pertinent concern, not the closest crocodile to boat, as your old boss used to say. This unassuming, wandering envelope is finally here, and inside, as you’ll find out in just a moment, was the Permanent Residents card and accompanying letters that will allow you and your partner to finally emigrate to Canada.

It wasn’t that you hate your home country, you live in the UK, a wealthy country with access to all the modern delights that satisfied at least the first few tiers of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Free healthcare, access to education, generally affordable housing, acceptable job prospects and a reasonably fair government in the scale of the governments that exist across the world.  

Yet it was the intangible need that escapes you, the level of desperate belonging that is not yet filled by your friends or family, of which you admittedly have few and far between. This desire to belong, combined with a wanderlust born out of youth, is what made you turn your eyes to the world in an open concept. English is your first and unfortunately only language, despite having a partly wider European heritage that is closer held in biology than in speech or culture. Therefore, in your search for a new home on foreign shores, an English speaking country was vital.

New Zealand and Australia seemed just a little too far, and in hindsight conversations with others and a few nights pouring over the dense world of immigration policy, had revealed that the criteria for entry was far more stringent and demanding that your eventual choice.

America was a country of contrasts, and despite the nationalism of your home country of England, America’s influence on social media, and the overall zeitgeist of today was too strong, the effect left a bitter taste in your mouth. You are of those that longed for the days where being English demanded a level of decorum, something that an unfortunate proportion of American’s whose content made the jump across the Atlantic, lacked. Therefore, the logical choice for you is Canada, a country of space where the cultural distance is close enough to your own, and thusly the painful transition of leaving everything you know will be eased, to only allow the good to seep into your life.

The more ill-informed, or perhaps just the young and optimistic populous will think that emigrating somewhere new would be simply an exercise of saving some money and booking a flight. Whilst the more weathered and seasoned of us all will consider that you need to fill out the necessary paperwork, find a new job and somewhere to live, and finally gather up substantial funds to make the jump. They would both be terribly wrong, and fundamentally disappointed. You knew that there was so much more to making a permanent move to a country that you didn’t hold any claim to.

Time, this is the greatest sacrifice you’ve made, your perception of what takes a long time, or even what a long time is, has been warped and redefined in what feels like a hundred times. In reality, in the units that most people use, it has been about five years, but to you it has also been four Christmases, five birthdays, two degrees, four jobs, three different houses and a wedding.  

Yet now all the years of hardship, of saying telling yourself that you were better off saving the money and not investing in fixing broken things or replacing those that cannot be fixed. Of telling yourself that it didn’t matter that your job didn’t have legs, or that the neighbours being loud and keeping you up all night was a small burden for cheaper rent. All of these tiny factors seemed insignificant in this moment, the letter was finally here. This innocuous piece of mail was the closest thing to a golden ticket that you’ve ever seen.

You slowly stood, foregoing all the takeaway leaflets and catalogues from previous tenants, you wandered through the house, the house that never felt like home, but now feels even more like a staging area. You brush toast crumbs from your tiny dining room table, another compromise in the internal refusal to put down roots anywhere but where you truly want to be. You place the envelope on the table, you dearly and desperately want to open it, but this is a moment to be shared with the person you love, and so you wait. For the sound of the crackled gravel, the rev of the engine as it pulls into the parking space, the creak of the handbrake and finally the sound of silence as the engine shuts off. You wait for the footsteps that follow, for the jangle of keys and the opening of the door. You wait patiently, because you've become very good at waiting, for that moment that will finally lead to end of the long wait.