Denied

Yerevan, Armenia 2024

We built a life, but not everyone made it into it.

We were in Apartment 13.

The place we rented in Yerevan.

So we could all finally be together. Joseph and I, and Ode, just shy of eighteen months old. Elie, Joseph’s brother, his wife Miray, and their two kids. Their son, Joseph, named after my Joseph, and their little girl Joya, named after Ode Joy.

Seven of us in a small, modest apartment tucked into a complex that felt just outside of everything. There was one small shop nearby where we bought groceries, the kind of place where you start recognizing the same faces within days.

We all thought the apartment was haunted.

Maybe it was the number. Or the way the building seemed to breathe at night, pipes shifting, doors settling. Or maybe it was us. The jet lag. The accumulated trauma none of us spoke about directly.

Zouzou, Joseph’s nephew, would jump at the smallest sounds. He thought balloons popping were bombs falling.

No one corrected him.

Elie would jump at the toilet seat dropping.

The email came first.

The embassy.

Then the congressman.

Joseph read it before I did.

I watched his face instead of the screen.

There’s a tell he has, I’ve learned it over the years. His eyes flicker, then close slightly, and his mouth opens just a bit, almost like a yawn. If you didn’t know him, you’d miss it.

It looks like nothing.

But it’s not.

It’s how his body absorbs impact.

I’ve never told him I know.

Some things you don’t say out loud.

My heart started to pound.

Not like the panic attacks I used to have, wild and consuming. This was quieter. Heavier. A knowing before the words fully landed.

If this didn’t work

When would we all sit like this again?

Would the kids still be small?

Would they even remember each other?

“It’s delayed,” he said finally.

Calm. Measured. Too measured.

He walked me through it line by line, like he was explaining directions, not a life.

Political language. Vague timelines. Another year. Maybe more.

After everything we had been told.

After the congressman said it was done.

His tone didn’t change.

But something underneath it had already shifted.

We didn’t tell anyone.

Not yet.

Dinner was already on the table, Cusa still steaming, plates passed between us, wine poured and refilled without anyone really noticing who needed more.

The kids were asleep in the next room, their breathing soft and even, the only steady thing in the apartment.

We sat across from Elie and Miray like everything was still intact.

Miray passed me another spoonful, apologizing that it wasn’t like Yola’s. I told her it was perfect. She smiled and said she couldn’t wait to eat at my house, that she still thought about the lasagna from New Year’s. I told her I’d make carrot cake next.

Small things. Normal things.

I watched Joseph closely. Waiting for something, a crack, a shift.

Nothing.

He stayed steady.

“I’ll tell him later,” he said. “We’ll go out, and smoke Hookah.”

He reached for his glass, missed it slightly, then adjusted.

That was it.

The only crack.

Elie raised his glass.

“To family,” he said, smiling. “To finally all being together.”

He looked at Joseph, then at me. “You did this. I know what you did for us.”

His voice caught, but he smiled through it.

“I can’t wait,” he said. “To see your home. For the kids to run on your land. To meet India, the famous dingo.”

He laughed softly, shaking his head, like it still didn’t feel real.

“I knew you would do this,” he said, looking at his brother. “I always knew.”

Joseph picked up one of Ode’s toys, a small squishy dinosaur and squeezed it in his hand. Over and over. Harder than he needed to.

No one noticed but me. I grabbed it gently from him, before it exploded.

“Do you remember,” Elie said suddenly, “when I got in trouble at the principal’s office?”

Joseph looked up.

“I was four,” Elie said, smiling. “And they told me I would never be like you. That you were the smart one.”

He laughed.

“I told them, why should I worry? My brother will change the world. I won’t have to do anything.”

I laughed too.

He wasn’t wrong.

And still,

I stood up and said I was getting more wine.

In the kitchen, I gripped the edge of the sink and let it come.

Not crying.

Not even that.

Just a kind of collapse.

Dry heaves. Air that wouldn’t settle in my chest.

No distraction strong enough to touch it.

I wanted to break everything in that apartment with the broom that was laying near the sink. Smash all the injustices and break the glasses and scream from the depth of my toes.

The insufferable suffering of just this family.

Is enough to make gargoyles out of saints.
How did Joseph still continue on?

The insanity of politics and the outcome, changed our congressman’s seal of approval.

Just like that.

Blown to smithereens.

Hope in a fucking basket of thieves.

When I came back, nothing had changed.

Same table. Same food. Same voices.

But something had been pulled out of the room.

Like walking into a space where something has just ended, before anyone says it out loud.

At the time, I didn’t have language for it.

Now I do.

If it didn’t happen now

it was never going to happen.

We had tried everything.

For over a decade.

Every form. Every lawyer. Every connection. Every possible way in.

We brought our eighteen-month-old son halfway across the world for this moment.

Built everything around it.

And still

nothing.

Joseph was already talking about next steps.

He always has a plan.

The next day, he started building one. A film festival. The Questioneers. Names, connections, a case strong enough to force someone to say yes.

He moved forward like movement itself could change the outcome.

Maybe it could.

But sitting there, in Apartment 13, with the hum of the building around us and the quiet breathing of children down the hall

I knew.

This wasn’t a problem to solve.

It was a line.

And we were already living on opposite sides of it.

We built a life,

but not everyone made it into it.