There is a video in my photo gallery that I avoid watching but can’t delete. It was taken on my last day in the U.S. The dogs circled in the emptied apartment, playing with each other, as if nothing was happening. My clothes piled up in the open suitcase in the background. In the front—my face, swollen from tears.
It’s been 205 days since I last saw my wife and our two dogs. Another thing I try to avoid is counting the days. Sometimes numbers ease you, but not when the number is growing and we can’t start the countdown. I don’t know when I will see them again.
Most people are puzzled when I tell them that marriage to a U.S. citizen doesn’t automatically grant you a U.S. visa or residency. That a marriage makes it more difficult for a non-resident to enter the U.S. because they are no longer a ‘desired’ type of tourist—with a tie too strong to believe they won’t take advantage of the country’s hospitality.
So my least expensive option—the marriage-based green card—also happens to be the slowest one. The processing time starts at nine months, but often takes twice as long. That’s what I tell them, my family. I state the facts as plainly as possible. I don’t want them to feel sorry for me.
Before I started On the Calculation of Volume: Book I by Danish author Solvej Balle, I already had enough of those conversations. I rarely brought up the green card with my family or friends anymore, and only talked about the present and the past, not the future, which was put on hold by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
On the Calculation of Volume is a series of seven books with the narrator Tara Selter waking up on the 18th of November again, again, and again. She is the only one to register the time loop, when everyone else lives each day anew, their memories of the previous November 18th erased.
I learned about the book from the Booker Prize 2025 shortlist, and the moment I learned about its premise I knew I was team Tara. I, too was stuck, not in time, but in the immigration process, where the status of the case—“pending” or “on hold”—became my version of November 18th.
Tara keeps a journal, where she counts and describes her days. What is there to describe if the same day repeats itself? A lot. The entries consist of mundane observations, registrations of moods and other things that fluctuate in the static world. Balle’s matter-of-fact style, rooted in tangible reality even when the subject—time—is as abstract as one could get.
Tara has to retell the story of what happened every morning to her husband Thomas. They spend months piecing together the logic behind the time loop, each time to no avail. Reading those chapters, I imagined the book adapted for the screen by Justine Triet, the director of the 2023 drama Anatomy of a Fall, brilliantly portraying the complexities of a marriage between people slowly drifting apart. Soon Tara gives up and isolates herself from Thomas, who still repeats the pattern of the same day, clueless of the fact that Tara is hiding in the guest room.
Not bringing up the green card meant I had to also cut some parts out of my language—the ones about my wife and our relationships, about the dogs that I have but whom I only see now on FaceTime. The self-censorship was not new to me—I was born in the ‘90s in Russia, and while I was having sex for the first time, Putin was signing a law to ban LGBTQ+-related topics, criminalizing queerness. Was I isolating myself in a metaphorical guest room, stocking up on canned food and chocolate when I didn’t talk about my green card? A whole room is of course better than a closet, but it’s still not a home.
When the ones who know about my November 18th ask about it, they refer to it as “situation”—as if it’s something singular, and the U.S. immigration system is not a machine that puts lives of thousands of people on hold, or, as Tara identifies that state: “I still have plans. Plans of a sort. Although I don’t know if they can be called plans anymore. They are loose and open-ended.”
I know that “the situation” is common because I became an avid reader of the USCIS subreddit page, where people post their immigration stories daily. There are plenty of posts that read ”FINALLY 10 YEARS GREENED💚💚💚💚” or “RECEIVED BY MAIL, YOU ARE NEXT!” I have nothing to report, and the further I scroll the more I feel like we exist in different timelines.
I read the entire book in bed. While in the beginning I was comforted by it, by the end it crushed me with a heavy realization: Tara was forever changed by what had happened. She will never be able to come back to her past self. Neither will I.
The immigration process, with its invasive bureaucracy, endless waiting time, interviews and exams—is another exercise in state violence created and maintained by nationalist politicians, obsessed with the protection of imaginary borders. Instead of feeling sorry for me, I want people to see the system that causes us suffering—whether we are going through an immigration process, or being isolated and oppressed in any other ways created by late capitalism.
When I was making a birthday wish at the party, one of my friends whispered in a complete silence: “I know what she is wishing for.” Everybody laughed: if you know, you know. Sometimes, as Toni Morrison said, you don’t get through life whole, you survive in part. And then I hear Tara’s voice in my head: “Maybe there’s healing in sentences,” a phrase that she repeats over and over throughout the book, and I agree: maybe.
