Finding the Building

Buying the form was the easy part. I had gone to the designated point of sale with the kind of nervous efficiency that comes from finally acting on a decision you have already made in your heart. I paid what was asked, I received the form, and for a moment I stood holding it in my hands, feeling its weight far exceed the thinness of the paper itself. This was no longer an idea lying awake in the dark. This was a document with my name about to be written on it, a document that expected something back from me.

The instructions were clear enough on paper. Complete the form, then submit it at the Police Credit Union. What the instructions did not tell me was exactly where, within the tangle of the area, that building actually stood. I knew the general vicinity the way you know a neighborhood you have passed through but never had reason to enter deeply; familiar streets, unfamiliar doors. I had heard of the place. I had perhaps even driven past it once without registering what it was. Knowing of a place and knowing how to arrive at it, I would learn that day, are two entirely different kinds of knowledge.

I boarded a commercial vehicle out of Jarra Jiffen, the form folded carefully inside a plastic bag to protect it from the dust and the damp of travel, as if it were already an official document of the state rather than a sheet I had filled out myself the night before at my own table, checking and rechecking my own handwriting under a lamp. The journey itself was unremarkable in the way most journeys in a shared vehicle are, stopping to pick up passengers, stopping to drop them, the low conversation of strangers who share a vehicle but not a destination. My mind, for its part, was not on the road. It was on the building I had not yet found, running ahead of my body toward an address it could not picture.

When I arrived in the area, I did what anyone does when they know a neighborhood but not a specific address I began to walk, trusting that recognition would arrive before exhaustion did. It did not. I walked in one direction with the particular confidence of a man who believes he remembers more than he actually does, and found nothing that matched what I expected. I turned back. I tried another road, then another, retracing streets I had already covered, each time certain that this next turning would reveal the building I was looking for. Each time, it did not.

There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from being close to something without being able to touch it, knowing you are in the right area, perhaps even within a few hundred meters of the door, while still being entirely lost. I felt that frustration build with every wrong turn, every street that looked plausible and then wasn't, every moment where I second-guessed a decision I had already been so sure of the night before. For a passing moment I wondered whether this was some kind of sign, whether a process that could not even let me find its own front door was truly the one Allah intended for me, or whether I was simply an unprepared man in an unfamiliar street, making the ordinary mistakes of someone new to a place.

I did not ask for help. I do not fully know why, even now perhaps a private stubbornness, a wish to arrive at this new life under my own power rather than someone else's directions, since everything about the recruitment ahead of me would demand exactly that kind of self-reliance. So I kept walking, retracing, correcting, until at last, on what felt like the fourth or fifth attempt, a building presented itself with a signage I recognized, and the tightness in my chest loosened all at once.

I stood outside the Police Credit Union longer than necessary before entering. Not because I needed to catch my breath, though I did, but because I understood, standing there, that the walking itself had been a kind of lesson, arriving before the lesson was scheduled to begin. Nobody had told me that this process would ask patience of me before it ever asked fitness or intelligence. Nobody had told me that even finding the door was already a test.

I went inside and submitted the form. It was a small, administrative moment, a clerk, a stamp, a filed document among many others that day. But to me it did not feel small. It felt like the closing of one door and the quiet, undramatic opening of another, one I had walked in circles to find, the way, I would soon learn, so much of this journey would ask me to do.