The Weight of a Document

For seven years, Miriam did not know what country she belonged to.

She left Asmara in 2013. She was twenty-four. She did not tell many people she was going because in Eritrea, telling people where you are going means those people can be asked about it later. She loved the people she was leaving. She did not want to put that on them.

She packed one bag. The kind you carry without looking like you are carrying everything you own.

The route took months. Ethiopia first. Then Sudan. There is a period in Khartoum she does not go into detail about. What she will say is that there were a lot of people moving through the same darkness, and that a woman she had never met before, a Sudanese woman who ran a small shop near the bus station, gave her food on two separate occasions and never asked for anything in return. Miriam still thinks about that woman. She does not know her name. She has no way to find her. She just thinks about her, almost every day, with a gratitude that has nowhere to go.

She got to Canada through Europe. When she finally reached a border crossing she was tired in a way that goes beyond the body. She had no documents. She said the words she had been practicing for weeks.

I am seeking asylum.

They gave her a file number and a hearing date. She was placed in a settlement house near Finch Avenue in North York. Three floors. Women from Somalia, Sudan, the DRC, Afghanistan. All of them waiting for the same thing, all of them speaking different languages, all of them understanding each other anyway. She shared a room with a woman from Mogadishu who prayed five times a day so quietly it sounded like breathing. Miriam is not sure she can explain why that felt like such a comfort.

It just did.

The IRB gave her refugee status in 2016. Eritrea's military conscription system, the one where national service has no end date, the one the UN has described as forced labour, that was the basis of her claim. The decision came in a letter. She read it once. Read it again. Then she put it face down on the table and pressed her palm flat against it. She just needed to feel that it was real.

She applied for permanent residence after that. Got it in 2017. By then she was in a basement apartment in Weston, working part-time at a laundry, sending half of what she earned home to her mother in Asmara through a transfer service that was expensive and slow but was the only one that actually got the money there.

People assume they know what she missed. The food, maybe. The weather. Family. And yes, all of those things. But what she missed most was something harder to explain. She missed being known. In Asmara she was Miriam, daughter of Tekle and Sara, the girl who grew up near the Catholic cathedral who argued with her father about politics and laughed too loudly in public. In Toronto she was a file number, then a case, then a resident. None of those words had her shape.

She decided to retrain as a nurse. She went to Centennial College in Scarborough because a woman from her settlement house had done the same program and come out the other side with a job and her feet on the ground. Miriam does not trust brochures. She trusts people who have already walked through the door.

The program was hard. She was glad it was hard. Hard meant she did not have time to sit with the grief of starting over, the exhaustion of being someone nobody knew yet. She did her placement at Scarborough Health Network's Birchmount hospital. She learned what it means to be with someone who is frightened. She had sat with frightened people before and she knew how to stay. She brought that strength with her into every room.

Her citizenship came through in 2022. The ceremony was on Progress Avenue. About forty people. Folding chairs. A Canadian flag that looked newer than everything else in the room. The judge said warm things. People cried. The man next to her, an older Sri Lankan man, pressed a folded tissue into her hand without making eye contact, like he already knew she was going to need it.

She took a photo outside afterward. February sky, grey and flat, the certificate in her hands. She is looking straight into the camera. She is not smiling the way you smile when something is simply happy. It is a different expression. The kind that comes from crossing things most people will never have to cross.

That photo is her phone wallpaper now. Some mornings on the bus to work she looks at it. She looks at that woman holding the certificate in the grey February light and she thinks about every single thing it took to get her there.

Every border. Every waiting room. Every night she was not sure it was going to be okay.

Then her stop comes. She gets off the bus. She goes in to take care of people.