Yesterday my mother handed me my first passport. I held the green plastic document in my hand and quickly opened it to the first page. On one side were two $10.00 stamps with the Queen taking up most of the space. Below her was the word, Dominica. I looked on the page directly opposite it and saw my picture.  It was a black and white picture of 7-year-old me. My hair was neatly combed in big cornrows or what we would call kangos back then. It held rows of kangos that started at my forehead and ended at the nape of my neck. My eyes were fixed and at the time I thought they were expressionless. My dark skin looked smooth and cold. I wore a floral wide collared shirt with a pinafore on top. After flipping through the pages for a bit I set it down and didn’t pick it up until the next morning.

As I sat at my desk prepared to write I saw the passport again.  This time I looked at the first picture again and realized that there was something familiar there.  Something that I had missed before. I recognized that look. The last time I saw it was in a dream I had several years before. A dream that was like an imprint that I kept going over again and again to recall something that I could not yet figure out. In this dream, as my present-day self, I was standing on one side of a long fence that seemed to go forever on each side. I was looking at a young girl between the ages of 5 and 7.  She and I stood on opposite sides of the fence looking at each other.  We did not say anything to each other.  As I looked at her I could see her round dark eyes fixed on mine. I felt she was trying to say something to me. I waited on the other side of that fence, hoping she would speak. Even though she seemed to be trying to say something through her gaze the dream came to an end without any word from her.

I found her gaze again when I flipped through the passport this morning. I found it in the eyes of the 7-year-old on a passport that was put together in haste—to get me out of a disaster zone to be reunited with my mother in Canada. I took a picture of the passport picture with my phone and zoomed in on the eyes of 7-year-old me. At first, they seemed cold and empty. They seemed distant and opaque. But as I zoomed in more I saw something I had missed earlier. I saw the grief of a child whose father had only passed a few months prior. I saw the loss of a child whose mother had immigrated to a country she knew nothing about. I saw the fright of homelessness in a child who had first lost her community due to a hurricane, and later her home due to immigration. My tears came in a hurry and I could feel a pain whose details I had lost. I scanned again at the picture and noticed a stamp cutting at the neck of 7-year-old me. I could make out the word commonwealth and part of the word Dominica. I scanned the pages again and saw the Canada immigration stamp with something in handwriting directly below it, “visitor until 1981”.  A feeling like the swell of the sea filled my ribcage. Then I looked at the page again and saw the same Canada immigration stamp with a similar inscription below it, “visitor until 1982”. The swell grew as I found evidence of the homeless state my child-self found herself in while flipping through the pages of my first passport.

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