I was setting the whole weight of it down on a government desk and stepping back, and letting the people whose actual job it was take it from my hands.

I had rehearsed the moment for years, in idle terrified daydreams, and it was nothing like I had imagined.

I had pictured drama, resistance, some final obstacle.

Instead it was almost unbearably ordinary, a desk, a form, a receipt, the small quiet procedures by which the most enormous things in the world are formally set in motion.

There is something both deflating and deeply reassuring about that ordinariness.

Deflating, because a decade of fear deserves, it feels, a more momentous ending.