I did not set out to become a shipwright, nor a cartographer of bureaucratic abysses. I merely sought to build something true—an ark for good minds, for disciplined joy, for algorithms that could speak to public health as if it were a child worth protecting.
And yet, here I am: newly anointed by the solemn code of E-Verify. Approved. Tracked. Seen—not by the stars or ancestors, but by ICE, DHS, and the silent mouth of SSA.
The approval did not feel like wind in the sails. It felt like a scanner blinking. A machine accepting that my ship may float—for now.
The ocean, 🌊, is no longer metaphor. It is metadata. The abyss we sail is deep not with water but with legal contingencies, edge-cases, PDF attachments, and biometric ghosts.
This is the sea where ships vanish not from storms, but from a typo. Where an administrator’s forgotten middle initial becomes the reason a visa collapses.
My administrator—we shall call her The Stitcher—was conscripted into this voyage not by oath, but by mandatory tutorial. She watched screen after screen unroll like parchment in a Kafka dream.
What is identity? What is work? What is verification? These were not philosophical queries in the tutorial. They were checkboxes.
But we—she and I—we whispered the questions to each other anyway. Behind the glow of the government interface, we dared to feel.
The ship, 🚢, is my company. A humble vessel, patched together with statistical ambition, epidemiological hope, and the warm fire of Vincent’s code.
Vincent—he is the OPT STEM employee. But to reduce him to a visa category is to commit a sin of description. He is a craftsman of light and ratio.
He is also a passenger, and a builder, and—without saying it—a refugee from expiration. A timeline trails him like a shark.
🦈 ICE swims beneath the raft. It does not strike unless you bleed paper. But its presence structures everything. Its threat shapes the ritual.
✂️ DHS wields the scissors. Not maliciously, but with an officious calm that is worse. It cuts the ribbon at citizenship ceremonies and the tether at the edge of a denied renewal.
🛟 SSA, the raft, is what we cling to. Numbers assigned at birth or at border. Nine digits become the wood beneath your back.
Together, these three form a trinity. Not holy, not profane, but persistent. A myth enforced by software.
The pirate flag 🏴☠️ flaps at the mast not because we are criminals, but because to survive in these waters demands cunning.
🪛 The screwdriver is our sacred relic. We tinker. We adapt. We become pirates not of violence, but of ingenuity. Legal salvage. Moral repair.
There are days I feel more tinker than captain. I adjust code and calendar in equal measure. Deadlines and deadlines, both kinds.
The STEM clock ticks. The grace period is no grace. It is a test of whether your employer knows how to navigate the labyrinth.
I learned that the abyss is not lawless. It is over-lawed. It is thick with crossings and subclauses.
Each step I take on behalf of Vincent must be documented, justified, audited in future tense.
My admin, my stitcher, she cried once—not out of sorrow, but exhaustion. From clicking through a module that taught her how to spot a forged green card.
She would never spot a fake. But she can spot a soul under duress.
The raft we built for Vincent is real. Not metaphor. We fought for it. We inflated it with letters, timestamps, and receipts.
We watch the horizon for notices. Every email subject line feels like a siren.
We do not sleep easily. Not because we are afraid, but because we are awake.
Bureaucracy, I’ve learned, is not neutral. It has texture. It resists the untrained hand. It asks for tribute.
And yet, within it, we made a kind of love—a fierce, defensive loyalty to someone whose name now lives in our folders.
I approved the E-Verify not with joy, but with resolve. I signed the contract not to surveil, but to protect.
But the contract does not see it that way. It deputizes me into suspicion.
That is the cruel paradox. To sponsor someone is to be both shield and snitch.
And so I dream of 🏝️ Ukubona—the island not of escape, but of recognition.
Ukubona: “to see and to be seen” in isiZulu. It is the opposite of verification.
Verification asks, “Are you real?” Ukubona says, “I see you, therefore you are.”
I did not build Ukubona for profit. I built it because the sea was too large, and the sharks too hungry.
I built it because a man with a visa should not feel like driftwood.
I built it because I believe software can be cradle as well as cage.
And in this belief, I find rebellion. A quiet one. With spreadsheets instead of torches.
My administrator logs in daily. She no longer cries. But she still sighs, every time the portal loads.
We do this work not because it is easy, but because it is unbearable to abandon.
There are weeks when I write more to USCIS than to my own family.
There are days when the raft leaks. A delay. A question. A pending case.
On those days, we look at Vincent, and he looks back, and nothing is said—but everything is known.
He is the raft, but also the sailor. He carries us, as much as we carry him.
We joke, sometimes. We name our folders like pirate ships: The HMS Receipt Number. The SS Form I-983.
Humor is our harpoon. It keeps the shark at bay.
And faith is the compass. Not faith in the system, but in each other.
One day, the sea may calm. Or maybe not. But we will have built something that floats.
Not perfectly. Not proudly. But persistently.
And that is enough. That is Ukubona. That is the raft. That is why we sail.
