Picture a woman who looks like she swallowed the sun

She is gently frowning, her face is covered in freckles.

Picture this. An incredible woman in her late twenties leaves the turmoil - but also the safety - of her country for something different, and therefore, better. She arrives intending to stay for six months, a little shocked from the way she’s treated like a criminal at the border. It’s 1989. 

WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE HERE? They bark at her when they see the dark green of her passport, the way she struggles to push out unfamiliar, and therefore tentative, words from a rather beautiful mouth. 

To learn English. 

They demand proof: what school? Which address? Why English? Where will you live? What are you worth? Why should we listen? 

And right before they stamp her passport, one of them tells her, you’ll be scrubbing my toilets in a week. That’s what you people do. 

Now picture this: an incredible woman in her late twenties trudging back and forth to class in the rain, marvelling at the monstrous synergy of the Bakerloo line and burying her face into her jacket to stay warm. On alternate evenings she works at the local Nisa as a cashier, pretending to be European and therefore, legal. Picture a woman who radiates warmth but who is afraid of being discovered, deported, degraded, who buys international calling cards once a week, rings home to lie about how well she’s doing, who cries on the phone when she hears her parents’ voices and pretends it’s laughter. 

Picture this: two months before she’s due to leave, she meets a man who seems different, and therefore, better. Turns out he frequents the Nisa she works at, knowing she isn’t European but choosing not to pry. Turns out he, too, is a stranger in this land. 

On their first date he invites her up to his flat and she feels disappointed, thinks, ah, I know what this is. But she goes and he spends an hour showing her photos of his nieces and his nephews, telling her about his homeland, the way his family slowly clawed their way out of poverty and the way that scars. A story she knows well. They communicate stubbornly, trying to be funny and witty and charming in hesitant English. On their second date, they fall in love. And then her visa expires. 

Picture this, an incredible woman meets a man who is smart enough to recognise it, and then she is forced to leave. Picture the kind of love that worms its way through multiple time zones, cultures, and continents, refusing to give way. They write letters, they call, they search for words in dictionaries, until he says, marry me or let me go. Marry me, or let me go. 

Picture this. A woman tells her parents she’s off to marry a man she’s known for three months. Who they’ve never met. Who comes from a county they’ve never heard of and speaks a language they don’t recognise. Picture the fear-filled faces of a mother and a father listening as their eldest tells them her husband-to-be has used up all his savings to buy her a one way ticket so she can marry him in his hometown, ten thousand kilometres away. 

Picture a woman in a red dress, signing her marriage certificate and shivering from the cold. Beside her, a translator, ensuring she’s legally consenting to what she’s doing. Behind her, a room full of strangers, crowding forward to get a glimpse. In front of her, her husband, who won’t let go of her hand. They go out to eat, unable to stop smiling, and her husband’s best friend mutters to him, you won't even last three months. This earns him a punch in the shoulder. 

Picture young love growing older, but never stale. 

Now finally, picture this: an incredible woman gives birth to a daughter who is compelled to tell stories. As her daughter reaches her late twenties and begins to understand what it means, as a woman, to journey alone into the arms of a stranger in a hostile country, she is astonished at her mother’s ferocity, at her recklessness. She thinks of all the ways it could have gone wrong, even though it didn’t. She thinks of how her mother would collapse in terror if she were to follow in her footsteps. One day I’m going to write about you. She tells her mother. 

Picture a woman who looks like she swallowed the sun gently frowning, her face covered in freckles. 

About me, daughter? There isn’t anything to write about.