This is the first photo I have ever uploaded to my blog. Because a picture is worth a thousand words. Because you can’t possibly understand.

This is my living room floor. And one member of my family’s paperwork for a visa application. One.

There are five of us.

This is only ninety percent complete. We are still waiting for the two most important papers of all. The one that says I have a job in Spain. And the one that says we’re not criminals.

We are not criminals. We are five people connected by a thought I had when I was a heartbroken nineteen-year-old freshman in college. The thought? I will teach ESL. I will marry someone. And I will take my family to a Spanish-speaking country so that my children will learn Spanish.

What you don’t think of when you are nineteen: your husband who doesn’t speak Spanish (but will go anywhere in the world with you). Your third child who becomes mute in any discomforting situation. The job you have had for seven years and the colleagues you love so dearly, many of whom you may never see again. The friendships that (head out of shell) you took years to develop, which will deteriorate rapidly upon your absence. The Girl Scout troop that may not exist while you are gone. The grandmother whose hands you can still picture grasping her husband’s back, who may die while you are overseas. The children who will be unlike their peers when they return.

All the praise and forced gratitude and jealousy and pain that you must face every time you speak the word SPAIN.

The financial tally. Life savings placed upon the floor of the home you purchased so proudly at the age of twenty-three, fresh out of college, the floor your husband took out and replaced with his bare and beautiful hands.

When you are nineteen and heartbroken and set your heart and educational future and every belief within your soul on an impossible dream that somehow you have made into a reality, the last thing.

The last thing.

That you want to hear, at age thirty-four, once the paperwork is laid out on the floor, is that you have CHOSEN this. So you must deal with all the pain, the unbearableness, the consequence.

So this? This semi-occupied floor which could never fit the file folder filled with paperwork? It is an image worth a thousand words that will remain unspoken. Because I will never know if my loss will be greater than my gain, or if a giant gush of a wind will blow it all away, just after I have laid out my family’s life for all to see, for all to never forgive me for.