The Quiet

As the plane taxied down the runway at OR Tambo, I felt a physical tearing in my chest. I wasn’t just leaving a location; I was amputating a limb.

I was completely broken.

I looked out the window at the Highveld grass, dry and winter-yellow, and I felt a wave of love so intense it stole my breath. There is a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in the soil of South Africa, some of it mine, some of it my ancestors’, all of it complicated. I hated the politics, I hated the crime, and I hated the “Necropolitics” that had tried to erase me. But I loved the land. I loved the thunderstorms. I loved the resilient, chaotic spirit of the place.

And I loved my mother. Leaving her standing in that doorway, at her age, was the hardest thing I have ever done. The guilt was a heavy stone in my gut.

But as the wheels lifted off the tarmac, I made a conscious choice. I decided to stop fighting the grief. Instead, I turned to it, and I thanked it.

Thank you, sadness, I thought. Thank you for breaking me today. Because your weight proves that I loved. If I hadn’t loved this country, if I hadn’t loved my mother, leaving would be easy. This pain is the receipt for the love I carry.

I let the tears come. I cried for the soil. I cried for the Colonel’s house. I cried for the little boy in the red dress who never got to grow up here.

And then, as the plane banked north, the tears stopped. A switch flipped. I went into Survival Mode. I dried my face. I wasn’t Juanita the victim anymore; I was Juanita the immigrant. I had to get to the States. I had to get my life back up and running. The time for mourning was over; the time for rebuilding had begun.

The House of Mourning

I landed in the United States expecting relief, but I walked into a heavy fog of sorrow.

The week before I flew, Amber’s mother had passed away.

I didn’t arrive to a parade. I didn’t arrive to a honeymoon. There were no balloons or cheering crowds. I walked out of the terminal into the arms of a wife who was deep in her own grief.

The air in the US wasn’t light; it was thick with sadness. We were two broken women holding onto each other. I was mourning the loss of my home; she was mourning the loss of her parent.

It was a somber beginning, but it was honest. There was no pretense. We didn’t have to perform happiness for anyone. We just went home, shut the door, and sat in the quiet together. In a strange way, the shared grief was our first act of true marriage. We held each other up when neither of us could stand.

The Paper Paralysis

There is a myth about immigration, that once the plane lands, the journey is over. The reality is that once the plane lands, the paralysis begins.

For the first month, I was effectively a ghost. I was physically present in the United States, but legally, I was frozen. I couldn’t open a bank account. I couldn’t apply for a job. I wasn’t even allowed to drive a car because my South African license was unrecognized here; I would have to start from scratch, like a teenager, to earn the right to be behind the wheel.

I was in limbo. I was a forty-three-year-old woman dependent on her wife for everything, waiting for a piece of plastic to validate my existence.

I was lucky. For many immigrants, this wait can drag on for months or years. For me, the Green Card arrived within a month. When I held it in my hand, the relief was dizzying. It wasn’t just an ID; it was the key to the handcuffs. I could finally open a bank account. I could finally look for work.

The Box Carrier

I found a job almost immediately at a local wine shop.

It was serendipity, but it was also necessity. Since I still couldn’t drive, I needed a job within walking distance of our house. The wine shop was close enough to walk to, so I put on my comfortable shoes and went to work.

The transition from “Project Manager at the ARC” to “Stock Clerk” was jarring, but also profoundly eye-opening.

The work was physical. I wasn’t sitting in boardrooms discussing remote sensing; I was moving hundreds of boxes. One day, I had to move eighty cases of wine. Around Christmas, the volume spiked, and I found myself hauling nearly a hundred boxes of beer and wine in a single shift.

My body screamed in protest. Every muscle ached. But in that pain, I found a sharp, uncomfortable realization about the life I had left behind.

In South Africa, I was soft. I had been protected by the insulation of my race and class. I came from a country where manual labor was almost exclusively the domain of Black people. I had watched men move boxes like this with apparent ease and vigor, their bodies conditioned by a lifetime of labor that I had been exempted from.

Now, stripped of my title and my privilege, I was doing the lifting. I realized how “white” my body was, how unaccustomed to the raw mechanics of work. It was a physical deconstruction of my privilege.

It was exhausting, sometimes frustrating work. But I loved it. There was an honest simplicity to it. I wasn’t fighting the government. I wasn’t fighting for my identity. I was just moving wine.

Slowly, box by box, I felt like I was building a foundation. I was tired, my back hurt, but I was working in America. I was rebuilding my life.