I have never been one for Valentine’s Day—luckily, neither has Salem. One year (while we were engaged, no less) he spent the day marrying his colleague while on assignment in Iraq (it was for a film, I swear) and even though the marriage only legally lasted for thirty minutes, I have never stopped making fun of him to this day.
(His film did go on to win two Emmy awards—and you can watch it here).
When we aren’t marrying other people, most of the time we are blowing it off (I honestly cannot even remember what we were doing this time last year, deep in the February quarantine that wiped our brains) but there have been a few in years gone by spent in Erbil or somewhere along the Turkish-Syrian border where he surprised me with a very cute bear that had “seni seviyorum”—I love you, in Turkish—embroidered onto it. It became a souvenir of a cheesier time in our lives.
This year we spent it curled up on the sofa, with our friend Isabel, watching the new Louis Theroux documentary '“Extreme and Online”—which details the growing, terrifying phenomenon of gaming culture and the far right. I couldn’t recommend it more, but I also had to pause it several times for my own sanity only for Salem to say something like, “these guys should really go hang out with ISIS sometime!!” Again, this might seem like a strange choice for Valentine’s Day—but remember that one of our first dates was ordering a pizza and watching the Al Jazeera documentary “The Road to 9/11” so maybe romance just works in mysterious ways. My advice? Find yours—hallmark and candlelit dinners are fucking overrated.
But maybe it is appropriate that this is the week that I also took a deep breath, and started gathering together my documents to renew my spouse visa, a process that is far more infuriating than it is romantic. First there are the questions—have you ever been involved in any terrorist activity? (What kind of self-respecting terrorist would admit this on a visa application?) and another favorite, have you met your spouse? (No. I am suffering through this entire fucking process to spend my life with a stranger).
After answering these questions (“no” to the first, “yes” to the second, in case you were wondering) I pulled out the binders—thick binders, bulging with the most mundane documents that you could possibly imagine: electricity bills from different apartments, council tax bills, tenancy agreements and tax returns. It looks like I’m a hoarder—and I probably am. I would love to follow in the footsteps of the sustainability Instagram influencers, and make a fuss out of making sure that all of my bills are paper free, but the Home Office loves paper—preferably with dates and stamps to make every step of the process as bureaucratic and insufferable as humanly possible. So, every time we get a piece of mail from a government agency, I take it and slide it into a piece of protective plastic, wondering if I will ever need to valiantly brandish an electricity bill as a weapon to fight for our right to be in the same country.
Sometimes I become jealous of couples who do not have to think about these things. What would it be like not to have to budget for immigration fees? I wonder what it would be like to be in a relationship where I don’t have to assume that the government could ask to see the text messages that I send my partner, or to actually become infuriated over these kinds of invasions of privacy.
But when you fall in love with someone who comes from another country—and one of you is a refugee—you cannot depend on a shared homeland to catch you if you fall. Instead, you hoard documents to convince various governments that you have a right to be together, and become accidental, unqualified—and yet, very qualified— immigration law experts as you try to construct the story of how you met and share a life together through documents that any ordinary person would throw in the bin (oh my god, American readers, I’m sorry…of course by that I mean garbage).
Still, as I look through three and a half years—yes, Home Office, that is how long I have lived in this country—of invoices from jobs that we’ve worked, documentation of trips that we’ve taken (once upon a time, when that was a thing), I realize how much we have built together. It isn’t just that our binders have grown thicker—our lives have grown more robust. Once, we didn’t know how long we would live in a certain country. Now, we’ve put art on walls that would have been barren in other apartments “just in case” we had to suddenly move. We lived (are living) through a pandemic—and had the luxury of annoying one another in person, while thousands of couples around the world were kept apart by travel bans and quarantines. Most importantly, we got our little cat—Dingle—who, as he purrs next to the radiator, seems blissfully unaware of borders, perhaps because he is the only British-born among us. I remember the day that we got him, carrying him in my lap on the train ride home, Salem and I looking at each other as we wondered how he was going to adjust to his new house, and how we would be with a little creature running around. A few days later, it was abundantly clear: we were all madly in love with each other, and our love exploded beyond anything we could possibly imagine now that we were a family.
Depending on the day you asked me, my favorite place used to be my old Brooklyn rooftop where you could see the skyline in New York City or a small shisha cafe in Beirut, where you can smoke while listening to the Mediterranean crash against the rocks. Now it is curled up as close to Salem and Dingle as I can possibly be, typically with the human among us staring at their feline son adoringly, as he purrs the most contended purr that I might have ever heard. “You know, I’ve never seen him hiss,” I told Salem, just the other day.
Salem laughed. “Why would he have any reason to hiss?”
Filling out this application is the absolute bane of my existence. But it also makes me think of all of the reasons that I want to keep them close, and for me, that is the most romantic thing in the world.