Right now a nice boy is hurting, and there's nothing we can do about it. The whole situation strikes me as damn unfair, too.
Vynce met *Joe a year after I met C, and they've been best friends ever since. He was a nice kid then, and still is at twenty-five. It's still a little hard to think of the gangly 14-year-old I once met as a grownup, but he is, of course. Three years ago Joe met a girl, Flora, from Indonesia and started dating her a couple of years ago. He's been saving up money to buy her a ring.
A few months ago Flora discovered that her mother had never applied for citizenship for her and her siblings after being granted a visa to escape danger at home; she was still a child when they arrived here, and was under the impression that citizenship had been an issue settled years ago. It was a terrible shock to both Flora and Joe, but they jumped through all the required legal hoops in hopes of getting the immigration folks to change their minds.
Flora, along with her siblings and Mom, are being deported in less than a week.
They're being told that she only has to stay in Indonesia for a year before being granted a fiancée visa, but it's still so damn unfair. Why is it that an illegal alien from Mexico can stay here even after committing other crimes, but a girl who did nothing but believe her mother that they were here legally is being sent back to the danger she once escaped? Issues of immigration are a lot broader than our issues with Mexico, but no one seems to remember that.
At least not until a nice boy is hurt after trying to do everything right.
* Joe and Flora are similar to their real names. I know Flora probably isn't an Indonesian name.
"We're all just shades of gray in a long and frantic race to catch a dying day (I just want to get through the day.) For one second I'd slit your throat, spill blood across the floor. Put an end to this game." - The Killing Moon, Subject A
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