Notes from a waiting room

The waiting room at the immigration office has no signal. I discovered this at ticket number B214, with forty people ahead of me, and spent the first ten minutes holding my phone up to the window like an offering.

Then I gave up and did what everyone else there was doing: nothing.

Boredom has a texture

Boredom, it turns out, has a texture. First it is restless, a kind of itch. Then, if you do not scratch it, it opens. I noticed the woman beside me was practising answers in Portuguese under her breath. I noticed the clerk at window four hummed when she stamped. I wrote three pages in the back of my passport folder, which is where this letter comes from.

We have engineered boredom out of our days, and we did it for good reasons. But it was doing work. It was the empty room the mind walks into when nothing else is asking for it, and in that room you sometimes meet your own thoughts.

My number was called after two hours and six minutes. I was, absurdly, a little sorry.

Lena · 3 May 2026, Lisbon