A normal Saturday for me, and I’m working the door at the restaurant I manage. It’s been a calm but pleasant lunch shift. We’re running a slim staff to help balance out the slow summertime. I’ve got my phone on me, in case the GM messages or a member of my staff needs to get in touch about the upcoming dinner shift, so I see it, when I get an email from my mother.
“Call your lawyer. New green card policy dropped and it sounds bad.”
I was in my twenties when I fell in love with Tomo. I’d never seen her face, but we talked every day. It had started as working together, me writing stories and her illustrating, or her drawing moments and me writing stories for them. I fell in love with the pattern of her thoughts, her ideas, her art. I messaged her first thing in the morning and right up until falling asleep. It didn’t occur to me then what it meant, that I was falling in love with a Mexican woman.
Tomo was, to her great credit, the more rational of us. When I confessed my feelings to her, she was hesitant to take up a long-distance relationship. We were communicating across an international border in her second language, making Final Fantasy VII fanworks together. She wanted time to think about whether that was really the foundation of a strong relationship.
To my credit, I was prepared for that answer and took it with grace. I wanted us to stay close, I wanted to keep writing with her, but not telling her I loved her felt like lying. And I didn’t want to lie to her. On June 12th of 2014, she decided to be brave for us. I saved the conversation so I could hold onto it through everything that followed.
On June 12th, 2014, Tomo told me “I want to, try with you, I mean.” and I cried with joy and thanked her and we talked and talked and talked.
And I told her: “It would destroy me to lose you, now that I know what it’s like to know you”
On May 23rd, 2026, over a year into Tomo’s immigration journey to the USA on a K1 Fiancee visa to be a family with me, and over a decade since we first said “I love you” to one another, my mother sent me an article with the headline “DHS stops granting green cards almost entirely.”
You may never have heard about the K1 Visa process, or the immigration process as a whole, save for information gained through 90 Day Fiance and other pop-culture moments. As someone who has walked through it, nothing could have prepared me for what fighting for a relationship really looks like. It’s exposing, humiliating at times, expensive, grating, repetitive, and numbing. It’s an exercise in slow, creeping dread and spikes of random terror. Immigration is a horror movie, and you cannot see the monster.
It may not feel this way to everyone–it may not even feel this way to Tomo, who had the good sense to get treatment for her anxiety disorder, and even without that never shared my abject horror at the thought of things like Airports and Paperwork. I have ADHD, and likely a smattering of depression and anxiety as ride-alongs. But after bad experiences in my youth with treatments for what then was just called ADD, I’ve eschewed all help for it.
Thanks to those same bad experiences and other childhood traumas, I also get very, VERY nervous when I’m in a situation where someone else holds tremendous power over me and the rules are nonsensical, opaque, and carry massive consequences. So, you know, airports. Courtrooms. Paperwork. Governmental Processes. All things my love for Tomo would put me in close contact with for years and years.
When I was young and prone to daydreaming about a future where I might be loved, I often fought for that love, tooth and claw, tearing bites and bloody knuckles. Thinking of those daydreams now puts me in mind of the type of person who says they would kill for their spouse, but won’t unload the dishwasher for them. Infantile, lacking understanding–a childish notion of what it is to fight for something or to protect someone.
Bravery is a multi-colored thing, hiding its vibrant plumage beneath the dull browns and grays of everyday drudgery. It is Tomo, going to Chihuahua to be interviewed at an embassy. It is her submitting to medical exams and sealed reports. It is her, packing up five suitcases and her cat, stepping on a plane and leaving her whole life behind to arrive in a country where any immigrant must feel more and more unwelcome.
Though she is the one most endangered, though she is the one who speaks all the time now in her second language, though she is the one who left everything behind to come here, still I have had to turn to her for comfort time and time again.
When I was a child, thinking of fighting for love, it never occurred to me that I would be the weak one–that I would need protecting and not just care in the aftermath. If someone were to attack us on the street, I feel fairly confident that I could protect her. But can I unload the dishwasher?
Paperwork is endless. The worksheets of gradeschool, which I so often failed due to sheer boredom, became my hope and my salvation, and still I could not do it alone. I’m not sure whether it was a failure to have to ask for help–I was not kidding that the immigration process is expensive. With friends and family helping us raise over $5,000 to begin the process with our lawyer, it still cost well over $8,000 more to continue through the years of effort and preparation.
When John Doe on the street hears our story and congratulates us for ‘doing it right’ I want to scream. “Doing it right” is next door to impossible without burying yourself beneath a mountain of debt, and that was with our kind lawyers at One Path Legal helping us as best they could.
And if the regular paper wasn’t bad enough, then came the need for Proof. Proof that I love her, that she loves me, that we have met each other not just at all, but recently. Pictures, text messages, screenshots–stories told in our own words of how we met, and why we love each other, and our promise over and over that it’s real, it’s true, I love her, here’s proof. And then you send it off with the sealed medical files, and the interview results, and the paperwork, the paperwork, the paperwork, and someone, somewhere, reads it.
I envision that person as the FBI agent in a movie, a corkboard with our pictures, with printouts of that conversation I saved (“I love you so much it keeps me awake,” writes Tomo. “I see the entire world through a lens of what I want to show you,” writes Lucy.), with our written descriptions of our relationship. I envision them circling my typos, or highlighting her turns of phrase, or calling in behavioral analysts to inspect our body language in our pictures. Did I send them pictures where I was standing too awkwardly? Was my recounting of our love story too saccharine to read as true? Will they hold it against us, that I’m an author and she is an artist and we tell stories together? Or worse, far more likely, the thing I have no way of knowing because it will depend entirely, I fear, on who it is doing the reading: Will they hold it against us that we are both women?
I am in my thirties now–past middle, heading towards what I see as Adulthood. I can unload a dishwasher, though I still sometimes sigh like a child at the prospect. I understand what it means to fight for a relationship.
My mother sends me an email that scares me, makes me pale and shaky, sends me searching, hunting, hoping for any proof it isn’t true. Or more–any proof it won’t touch us. That we don’t have to fight again yet, that I don’t need to decide what to do if my beloved wife is called on to self-deport and leave behind a life she has settled into like it was meant for her.
But I am no longer a child, to think tooth and claw will save us. I step away between my double shift, and I go to my brave, strong Tomo. No grey and brown drudgery can hide the brilliance of her feathers from me, after what I have seen her hold and carry. Her strength has never been a question for me, since the first day she came to a foreign country just to meet a woman she loved on the internet. I went to her, in the middle of her work day at the toy shop, and she pulled me aside into the classroom when she saw I was falling apart.
“Here,” she said, and showed me her page on the USCIS database, where her green card paperwork was still listed as ‘in process.’ “Nothing has changed.”
Nothing has changed.
A normal Saturday for me, working the door at the restaurant, and an email sent in worry drains my blood, leaving me pale and shaking. I take a check to the table, and wonder if I should have let us stay in bed that morning after all, curled in each other’s arms, enjoying the cool fall of fresh sheets and the soft contentment of our immigrant cat, instead of dragging us both up for a work day. What if that was the last time it feels easy, I wonder, and almost burst into tears while I smile at the couple and thank them for coming in, giving them back their card.
We are okay. We are on each other’s side. Tomo sees the world in things to share with me. I want to try, with her, together. It would destroy her to lose me, now that we know what it’s like to be together.
I love her so much it keeps me awake.
Postscript: Tomo and I are okay for now, but millions are not. If you are able, please consider supporting the National Immigrant Justice Center or look into your own local immigrant support organizations. Though I am scared and never as strong as I want to be, Tomo and I are exceedingly lucky to have an incredible network of support. There are so many who aren’t as fortunate, and are just as deserving as we are.
Lucy K.R. 