It’s here.  It’s here!  It is finally here!

Finally, after far too many decades of in-identity, of un-wordliness, of crossing my fingers at the border between Canada and the US with a drivers license and a flirty smile, after all that I now have a passport.

I am a citizen of the world!

Well, no.  According to the first page of my passport I am a citizen of the United States.

But I can go play with citizens of the world.

Oh it is so pretty.  What a pretty, pretty shade of blue.  What gorgeous, if empty, pages it has.  I love its compact size.  I love its papery binding.  I love it so much I want to…

Get it really, really, really dirty.  

Let this book, this pretty, spotless book, be marked.  Let it be scribbled in and stamped.  Let it be bent and broken.  Let this book be torn and mended.  Let this book be smudged with a hundred thumbs of a hundred customs agents.  Let it be dirtied by the splash of a wet street in Paris and the mud of the Amazon.  Let this book, above all others, be my constant companion.  Let it follow me, close to my chest as I hike dirt roads in India and let it be smushed and smeared next to my make-up in my purse as I traipse through Milan.  Cover this book in exotic foods.  Dye it in saffron, color it with wine.  Oh let this book see worse days, let it long for better.  Let it find them.  Let this book lead me away from home, let it follow me back again.  Let this constant companion on my road reflect the joy and sorrow my life promises.

How I long for the day my passport, so shiny and stiff and new, looks rough and disheveled.  As the physical representation of the freedom it allows me I want this small folder of paper to show that I am not ungrateful.  Let this book tell them, in all languages, that I long to know the value of the world.  Let it say that I will not waste my freedom or my life.  Let everyone who looks at it, filled with its marks and visas, its rends and tears, let them know the girl who owns it is not afraid.  The girl who stayed at home, who stayed quiet, who was docile and domesticated:  She is no more.

This girl has a passport.  And she’s not afraid to use it.