6/4 Naturalization interview. I know all the answers just like in school, when it wasn’t supposed to be that anybody was this good. I had just memorized the one hundred questions and answers on flash cards, and of course I knew them all today. I had practiced them one last time on the subway. It didn’t seem like I was answering questions, I just talked.

The lobby of the building is brand new, and yet, as I nervously walk through the empty switchback lanes, and at the end of them, pour all my things into the bins at the security scanner, the guard jokes that if I have yet another item, that’ll be five dollars, a joke that I can only acknowledge by commencing to laugh after a second, but not respond with any kind of joke in return. The seventh floor, the interview floor, is as old and worn as any government facility.

My interviewer is a resolute woman in her thirties. She begins asking me interview questions without any opening statement. They are indistinguishable from the request to spell my new wife’s last name. They do know about the order of protection that was filed against me some six years ago, which I had never mentioned in any of my filings, but they don’t seem to know the resolution of it, DISMISSED WITH PREJUDICE, which seems genuinely new information to her as I pull out the document to prove it. Is that an original, can I keep the original, I will make a copy of it. She hands me back the copy, not the original.

This, I guess, would also be the time when it turns out they know my browsing history and consider me not of good moral character because of it. But either they don’t know my browsing history, or it’s just a normal browsing history like everybody else’s. I pass, I am accepted. My oath ceremony will likely be end of August.