wait – A Well-Lit Path

A page takes flight, like a folded airplane, and lands on a desk. A public servant seated at that desk notices movement, glances toward the 752 paper airplanes before them, many having missed the runway and skidded off to the floor, or worse, having barreled into the undiminished pile like a stone into a drift of last night’s snow, cause and effect of chaos’ avalanche.

The public servant, secure for life in a poorly-paid job, paws briefly at the pile to see what just flew in, with no hope of distinguishing new wings from old, new paper from old; and eight hours minus 15 minutes’ rest in the morning minus one hour of sunshine at luncheon minus 15 minutes break in the afternoon reduces one day to six-and-one-half hours of mind-numbing bureaucracy, this day every day minus weekends minus holidays minus funerals.

One of those paper airplanes was the third of three — dare I whisper the word “last”? — visa renewal applications filed with the new Entrepreneurs’ Visa Office in Madrid. It is a new type of application, and everyone is trying to get it right, presumably but not certainly pulling the process in a mutually agreed-upon direction. It took off from Cata’s Human Resources department almost a month ago, and landed in the snow atop that desk one month minus two days minus one coffee ago. A smaller airplane flew back with a big blue stamp in the upper right-hand corner, and a date that showed it was received at the big hangar of the front desk, then tossed upwind to the tiny landing strip that serves as a desk that serves as the public servant’s purgatory.

And then…

Well, it might have been a morning break, and it might have been an afternoon break, or it could conceivably been everyone’s lunch break (but probably not). It may have landed on a Friday when an entire week of processing sameness would have blurred even the best vision, conceding that the public servant’s vision had not been the best, lately, not the best, suffering staring down the text of sameness from a distance of 67 centimeters, not nearly a bird’s-eye view, for the past two decades. It might have landed with so many other little hopeful aircraft that not one or another but the whole flight was lost in the buzz and whir of their landing.

One can only guess. The truth may be less charitable, and more believable.

Whatever the facts that God knows and I do not, the visa application that we so carefully folded and threw (three times! third time pays for all! or does it!) into that bureaucratic snowsquall, that resulted in a letter of arrival and tacit approval, was in fact never opened. It was, in fact, an unidentified flying object, something alien in nature, unrecognizable and unrecognized, which was never recorded by eye or mind or hand or pen or paper of that one public servant, and so it did not enter into that vast and probably terrifyingly poorly-designed government database that Knows All Things (God knows more), did not appear at the Federal Police on the Rambla Guipuzcoa in Sant Martí in Barcelona, Spain, where one travel who will remain planeless shook his head in disbelief and discussed options.

There were none, and that one traveler is not a traveler after all, it seems, but a free prisoner in one of the most sought-after tourist destinations in the world.

But why disbelieve in something that is so purely human in its complexity and inanity, a face so human that you hope and pray we did not create god in our image? It is actually by far the most expected outcome, similar to the too-human political cycle in the States, the too-human consumption of the planet, too, too human, too.

If I have entertained you well enough to have read this far into a metaphor stretched far beyond its usefulness, and did not yet get the gist of it: even though my visa is theoretically “in progress”, again or still, however you want to define it, it is not marked so in the government’s system. A new visa, there is apparently an unexpectedly huge backlog, and the stamp we received meant the documents were received, but nothing more. I can get no authorization to travel, cannot return legally to Spain if I leave, and should I return on a tourist visa, could only stay illegally, jeopardizing a process we have already spend several hundred dollars and 8+ months to conclude.

And if THAT wasn’t clear: I lost my flight in a sea of paper, and can’t visit you all this season. Big hugs to all the friends I wanted to hug, with the biggest hugs reserved for my best-loved big kids, Nicolas and Isabela.