No-man's land

It’s official: this is no-man’s land. Yesterday I my receipts from the Immigration Department arrived and now I’m a resident of nowhere. I’m not a resident of the US until – if – my application is approved, and as I’m now living here, I’m not an Australian resident either. I’m an Australian citizen who’s not allowed to go home, not even classed as a visitor anymore in this country. And the thing I like best about it is that it’s official: I am nothing!

I remember my foreign friends in Australia – Tiff, Martina and Tomas – all going through a similar process. It was hard for them to wait for someone else to tell them what they were. And I imagine that if I have to wait three years before I can go home – like some of them did – then it could become hard for me too (although I guess the whole point of this exercise is to be able to call this home instead). But for the moment I am reveling in being officially nothing, a glitch in the system, a nobody from nowhere. No thing.