You can live somewhere for weeks and still be a visitor. You can know where the bread is, which café has the good coffee, which bit of pavement trips you up every time, and still not belong. Belonging starts when you have to deal with the systems.
The systems do not care how long you’ve been coming here. They do not care that the kids already answer to their names in Spanish. They do not care that the woman in the bakery knows our order. They care about documents. And copies of documents. And sometimes copies of the copies.
We thought we were basically sorted.
That was the phrase that doomed the morning.
It started with the school. Not the teaching part, the paper part. A polite email that said, in essence, everything is fine, we just need a few more details. The kind of message that looks small until you open the attachment.
It wanted health details. Fair enough. Then it wanted numbers. Then it wanted proof of things we had already proved in other forms that were now apparently living in a different drawer in a different office in a different universe.
Somewhere in the middle of this, someone mentioned healthcare cards.
Not “do you have them?” but “you’ll need them for the file.”
That’s how we found ourselves in the building with the hard chairs.
Every town has one. The place where nobody goes unless they have to. The lighting is always slightly wrong. The chairs are designed to remind you not to get comfortable. There is always at least one person who seems to have been there since the 1990s.
You take a number. The number is not called for a very long time.
The kids were brilliant for about twelve minutes. Then they were normal.
We watched three different versions of the same conversation play out at the desk. People arriving confident. People leaving less so. People being sent to another desk with a piece of paper and a look that said “don’t lose this”.
When it was our turn, we discovered that we had almost everything. Which is another way of saying we were missing the one thing that mattered.
The woman was not unkind. She was not warm either. She had the calm authority of someone who knows the rules and knows that the rules will outlive us all.
“This,” she said, tapping one form, “needs this. And this,” tapping another, “needs that first.”
It was beautifully circular.
We went to the other office. That one was smaller and smelled faintly of cleaning product and old air. There was another queue. Of course there was.
At some point Bryan went very quiet in the way he does when he is trying not to turn this into a project plan with phases and contingencies.
Marta, on the other hand, started chatting to a woman behind us who had opinions about the best time of day to come back and which person you hoped would be on which desk.
This is the difference between us in one small, perfect moment.
We did not leave with the cards.
We did leave with a clear list. A real one. Not a vague “come back with the right things”. A proper checklist. Three items. Two photocopies each. One thing that had to be done online first.
On the walk home, the kids were arguing about something important like who got to press the crossing button.
And I realised that this was it. This was the test.
Not beaches. Not dinners. Not “do we like it here”.
This.
Knowing which building. Which door. Which order.
Belonging is not a feeling. It’s a competence.
It’s being the person who knows to bring two copies without being told. It’s knowing which queue is the slow one. It’s not being surprised by the form.
We are not there yet.
But we are no longer confused by the shape of the maze.
And weirdly, that feels like progress.