See the girl, the one with dark hair and fingernails bitten to the quick. Today, she is allowed to be human again. 

Alone in the apartment when the envelope arrives, the girl scoffs at the priority express logo on the corner. Since when has she been considered a priority by this country? Nonetheless, she can’t stop her hand from trembling as she reaches for the card inside, the confirmation she sought for all these years bolded across the top: “United States of America Permanent Resident.” 

The card itself is a hideous thing, spattered with watermarks in a gaudy shade of money-green, but as she holds it, imagining what it’s like to belong since birth, she can feel its power. She had dreamt of this moment even during her marriage ceremony, when she looked into a strange man’s eyes and told him I do. 

Her mother had cried then, but the girl wasn’t sure if it was out of pride or shame. She wanted to laugh at the absurdity. Was this it, this tired remix of the American Dream? 

The girl pinches the card until her nail beds turn white, hoping she might feel happier with veritable proof of her humanity secure in her hand. She stares at the little rectangle with her picture on the bottom left corner: a stranger looks back. 

With an unfamiliar last name and eyes framed by slightly clumpy mascara, the girl in the photo wears the same forlorn expression as the bird-like women who had perched in the windows of her old neighborhood, motionless except for the swivel of their eyes following her as she passed. Their sameness scared her, yet she was impressed by the glamor of their quiet martyrdom. The girl thinks of them now, women trapped by a different type of misery. She might have become one of them if she was not already classified as an Alien. 

It was a Thursday afternoon and the girl thought her mother was joking. They both loved watching science fiction movies on the weekends, curled up on the couch with a bowl of chips between them. She had looked down at her arms and examined them exaggeratedly as if looking for green mottling her skin. She had spun around, demanding to be checked for the sudden growth of a tail, but her mother didn’t laugh along like she expected. The girl grew afraid in the silence.

Ten years later, the night before the girl’s marriage ceremony, her mother would ask if she resented her for bringing her to America. No, the girl would respond, unsettled by the unfamiliar glimmer in her mother’s eyes. Her answer came so quickly that she didn’t know herself if it was a lie.

Even now, the girl still isn’t sure. She supposes it doesn’t matter. She learned a long time ago that in a world where she has almost nothing, other people’s happiness is the only currency she can afford. 

It really is laughably simple to pretend. Most are too busy wanting something from everyone else — love, money, success, intimacy — to examine closely the way it was given. Growing up babysitting herself as her mother worked, the girl picked up how to lie as naturally as she had learned English. She was already forcing her mouth to stretch into unfamiliar syllables, and she did not see much difference in the pliability of the truth. They’re both just products of her environment, tools in her arsenal for this brave new world. She didn’t care much about morality when well-meaning teachers might get her mother fired, telling her during her shift to pick the girl up because third graders cannot walk home alone. 

She only messed up once in her childhood, although once could’ve been enough. 

Her mother had been late before, but never so late that moonlight shone through the curtains the girl was told to always keep closed. Ten minutes, she promised herself. Of what, she didn’t know, but it helped to wait with some semblance of purpose. 

She sat as time passed, her chest feeling tighter and tighter as if each rotation of the clock hand was winding a spring embedded deep within her. She lost count of how many sets of ten minutes there have been. As the pointer passed twelve once again, the girl heard the tick with the finality of intricate machinery set irrevocably in motion.

The girl stood up, her right foot slightly numb where she had tucked it beneath herself. It only took ten paces or so to cross the one-room apartment and reach the front door. As she turned the knob and stepped outside and started to scream, she knew with the calm certainty of a historian that her mother was dead. It was the only plausible explanation. 

She screamed until the sky changed colors, until neighbors she had never seen opened their doors to witness the little girl whose anguish exceeded the usual amount they allotted for a thin-walled neighborhood like theirs. She remembered an older woman with silver streaked hair coming up to her, the type of woman whose kindness her mother warned was dangerous to people like them. A woman who so reeked of belonging that the girl almost choked on the foreign air.

She had put her arms around the girl and said something vaguely comforting, though she doesn’t remember what. All she knows is that before her dead mother materialized in front of them, explaining to the woman in her broken English that her car’s batteries died, the girl felt like she was being seen for the first time.

When she screamed, the girl did not have to worry about hiding her accent. The sounds came naturally enough. She did not have to straddle different worlds to be understood; the language of emotion was the same across every culture. When she screamed, she was just a girl. She was sad, of course, but there were so many other sad people in the world.

 Standing in her apartment, holding the piece of plastic perfumed with artificial welcome, the girl wonders if she would feel better if she had thrown more tantrums in her childhood — after that day, she never let anyone see her cry again. She would do anything, suppress anything to avoid the stricken expression she had seen on her mother’s face. 

The girl has come close to breaking that promise many times, but she’s gotten better at hiding it. She’s learned to look for corners, dark crevices she can press herself into when feeling upset, as dependable and solid as any embrace. It’s a routine she’s come to expect on almost every major holiday, birthdays and Christmas and New Year’s Eve. These are the days that she is forced to remember she isn’t technically alone, clicking on icons that say “Aunt,” “Grandmother,” or “Father” for a brief, obligatory conversation, hoping their connection isn’t as unreliable as the last time she tried. 

It’s always an awkward affair because the girl isn’t sure how to apologize for the way time has changed her. “I remember when you were younger,” they would begin. She just sits and nods, hoping her silence is enough of a blank canvas for their reminiscence. “Two pigtails with pink ribbons…the silly way you ran.”

She loved and knew them once, she’s sure of that. The girl has seen her baby pictures, her toothless smiles and the possessiveness of belonging that tightened their arms around her. They used to be a family. They are a family, her mother always says, but it’s difficult to not think in the past tense. Looking at their crescent moon smiles, declaring their love to her in a language she no longer masters, the girl feels like an Alien. 

The physical distance between them isn’t far, maybe a 20-hour plane ride without delays — she had looked it up one night, shaking and stomach full of cake on her birthday — but its span is one she can never cross. There have been too many missed recitals, skinned knees she weathered alone, milestones she knows logically they couldn’t have seen. But there is no logic to loneliness, and knowing does not make up for empty seats around the table. The girl is exhausted, though her life has just begun. 

Got her young, that’s what they did, molding her into an American in every aspect except her birthplace. She was fed the same dreams, taught the same enterprising attitude, until she too believed she could do anything, until those same people told her she cannot. Do they have any idea the devastation of just, of being almost enough? She doesn’t know what more they want from her. She is tired of proving her personhood.

The girl is human again today, though even now her humanity is conditional. On the bottom of the card, directly adjacent to Lady Liberty’s glowing torch, is an expiration date two years into the future.

When she first arrived here, cheeks chubby with baby fat, they told her to speak English, so she did, denouncing her native language in the remedial class before school, trying not to yawn in a room full of other students who needed to be fixed. She wanted so much to be whole again, to understand what those pretty girls were laughing about on the playground. 

The girl has been pledging her allegiance day after day earnestly with her hand over her heart — she’s grown taller since that first time in elementary school, her pronunciation better. Soon she even graduated from saying the words altogether — but she always believed, at least partly, that they were true. Taken for granted that the place where she grew up would be more important than the place she had escaped from. She was a fool for trusting them; there never was freedom by proxy in this country. 

Today, the girl is human. Today, she realizes she will never be human enough. 

With liberty and justice for all? Not for Aliens.