Passports can be the life of you. In it is inscribed all your details, from when you were born, right down to how tall you are this very day. It tells dry tales of where you’ve been in the past five years, and how long you’ve stayed in a particular destination.
Does it say how much fun you had during your trip to Brisbane? Or of the wondrous food you had when you stayed in Hong Kong? What about your virginal experience of white flaky things falling from the sky when you last visited Canada?
You’re right. I didn’t think so either.
But passports, those red, devilish things. They can be the death of you. Especially when yours starts bleeping, warning of its unavoidable death, coming soon.
What to do? What to do?
Do you try to slow down its death, knowing how impossible it is? Or do you try to give it herbs and drugs, all to prolong its miserable life? I don’t know what you do. But do you know what I do?
I scream at it.
I hold it in both my hands, cradle it like a newborn, and scream. Why do you have to die? I cannot resist the question. Why do you have to die here? It’s freakishly troublesome, I tell it, especially if you die outside of your home country. Now what am I supposed to do? Do you know, I scream at it some more, you’re a nightmare to maintain?
For centuries and centuries more, we’ve been hunting for that elusive Elixir of Life, that one thing that keeps us youthful, that stops us from aging, that gives us eternal life. How I wish it were here now, and I could feed that elixir to this damned red booklet of mine. I don’t even want it for myself. I just want my passport to never die. It’s painful agony for me.
But I guess in the end, prolonging life past its expiry is just messy business. A transaction that I’m willing to forego, but simply can’t live without.
