I expected them to interrogate me at the airport and they did.
I found this sentence on the first page of Isabella Hammad’s novel Enter Ghost and stopped reading. This wasn’t the shattering emotional impact of Camus’ famous opening line in L’Etranger, but it resonated with the mundane, exhausting truth of my own lived experience. How many times had I spoken this exact sentence? How many dinner parties and coffee dates had featured some variation of this same tired story?
My friend Miguel once said, “Our immigration system is based on vibe check,” and I’ve never heard anything more accurate. The customs officer looks at your passport, then at your face, then back at your passport, and in that very brief moment decides whether you belong. Whether you are trustworthy. Whether you are the sort of person who should be allowed to cross an invisible line drawn by history and politics. What they’re really asking isn’t about your itinerary but about your right to exist in a particular geography.
I remember once, after twenty hours of travel to a country I’d been looking forward to visiting for years, being pulled aside for questioning. During the final leg of my flight, while others dozed around me, I had rehearsed my answers like lines for a play: where I was staying (a small hotel in the tourist district), why I was visiting (tourism, of course), how long I planned to stay (two weeks because I have a new job, no more), what other country did you visit previously (Myanmar, because I was on a quest to visit every single Southeast Asian country). I watched other travelers ahead of me breeze through with a casual mention of their hotel name, their passports stamped without a second glance. But I knew that my face, my name, my background would trigger additional scrutiny.
The interrogation lasted forty minutes. Each question delivered with practiced suspicion, and each answer I gave received with narrowed eyes. The performance I’d rehearsed on the plane unfolded exactly as anticipated. When finally released, I felt not relief but a dull confirmation. The world is your oyster, but terms and conditions apply.
Borders aren’t real in the way mountains or oceans are real. They exist because we all agree to act like they do. We draw lines on maps and decide these lines separate one nation from another, one “us” from another “them.” Despite knowing this, I still feel something important happening each time I cross a border. Even after dozens of crossings, I still can’t quite explain why these made-up lines hold such power over how we move through the world, and yet they have shaped me: they have cost me career opportunities—conferences I couldn’t join despite full sponsorships, programming retreats I couldn’t participate in because some people didn’t trust me enough to let me in to their country. Each passing day I felt a quiet narrowing of possibility, until I resigned to the fact that this is just how it is. I could hear the gentle click of the doors closing for no reason beyond your assigned place in this lottery of birth.
What Hammad captured in that single sentence—what made me stop reading and start reminiscing about that moment in the airport as I was whisked away for questioning—was the peculiar resignation that comes with anticipating judgment. Not fighting it, not being surprised by it. Just plain acknowledgment of its inevitability. I expected them to interrogate me at the airport and they did. The sentence holds both the knowledge of what’s coming and the confirmation that your knowledge was correct, the way I had knowledge of what was about to come for me in the airport, and the following interrogation that became my confirmation. It’s a closed loop of expectation and fulfillment, the small, sad satisfaction of being right about something you wished wasn’t true.
I picked up the book again and continued reading, but a part of me was left at that border crossing, standing in line with all the other travelers, waiting for someone to decide whether I belonged.