A Newcomer's Notes on Belonging

On Arrival

The first winter was difficult in ways I did not expect. Not the cold — I had been warned about the cold. What surprised me was the silence.

Not absence of sound. The city is full of sound. But a particular social silence: the careful non-acknowledgement of strangers, the eyes that find the middle distance on the bus, the politely closed doors.

Then someone held a door open for me. And then someone else explained the bus route. And then a woman at the library spent forty minutes helping me fill out a form I could not read.

I began to understand that belonging here is built in increments, like a dry stone wall.