My Journey Back to the United States by Tim Ghazzawi:
I smiled and said, “Good afternoon,” though I didn’t expect or even want the same in return. All I hoped for was to pass as normal and ordinary and problem-free. I wanted to seem boring but not strange. Nice but not weird. It was my last trip through an airport after eight months of traveling. All that separated me from home was the immigration officer and his stamp of approval. Four hours and still in the airport later and I thought to myself that perhaps I hadn’t been nice enough.
“Countries visited,” the tiny line read. There wasn’t enough space to record everywhere I’d been these last eight months so instead I wrote “Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey,” the final three countries of my travel journey. When I handed the officer my immigration form, he looked it over and then at me. Then he took my passport and placed it into a clear box with a red top and handed it to another officer on duty, who escorted me to a waiting area in a separate part of the airport. Together we walked past the customs queue and the door to baggage claim. I didn’t know where he was taking me but assumed the procedure was coronavirus-related, compounded by my complicated travel history.
“Behind the plexiglass,” the officer directed and pointed to a screen that divided the waiting area in two. Three rows of chairs were occupied by a hodgepodge cast of characters. Everyone from mothers with young children to middle-aged businessmen to senior citizens in wheelchairs filled the space. There were no signs to tell us where we were or announcements to listen to or papers to read over. The one bathroom made available to us opened only by passcode. The simple instructions we received were to sit so sit I did and waited.
One young man refused. He paced the small area back and forth until a team of officers surrounded him and repeated their instructions to sit down. The man seemed nervous, kept looking toward his backpack, which at the time was being searched by a different set of officers nearby. “You have something in there we should know about?” they asked him. The man hesitated and they asked him again. Another pause and this time the man responded, as casually as one might talk about the weather, “I have a lot of gold in there.” And that’s when I knew this wasn’t your average waiting area.
You see, I was flagged as a risk of some sort and not because of the coronavirus. No one ever took my temperature. They never even collected my medical form which I’d been forced to fill out on the plane. It was my eight-month stint abroad that did me in and earned me a spot in the room I recommend none of you visit. “And before Turkey?” they asked me and I told them. “And before the Philippines?” they asked me and I told them. “And your purpose for all this travel?”
“You want me to write my answer here?” I said, pointing again to the same tiny line on my immigration form. In that moment, I smiled for the first time in hours. The different places and faces of my last eight months whirred in and out of focus as I thought about my response. “I’m going to need a bigger paper.”
