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The September night near the Mexican border in Arizona is somehow darker than every other night I’ve ever seen. The ocean of the exquisite darkness, that covers my blue Greyhound bus like a veil and camouflages the desert, the cacti, and even the stars, makes everyone onboard calm and sleepy. We are going to Phoenix, me and a bunch of Latino men, sailing through the night like a ship of fools navigated by our black driver. “Nobody takes buses here”, my American friends warned me. “Just Europeans and weirdos”. Well, holding a passport of an Eastern-European nation, nobody was aware of before the war in my country had started, I guess, I count as both. We are stopped by the border patrol right after Yuma: just another city, I would probably never have a chance to properly visit. My American friends barely took me complaining about not being able to see every tiny town, passed by my Greyhound ships of fools, seriously. “There’s nothing to see there”, they say about every single town like that. “It’s a shithole”. Having that freedom of holding citizenship and a driver’s license, therefore being able to visit every single shithole in the tristate area whenever they please, my American friends struggle to understand me. I was born right after the iron curtain had been lifted, and for the most of my life, every trip to other European countries was accompanied by the long, costly and humiliating process of visa approval. I guess, I would never stop being afraid, that another iron curtain would enclose my country from the world again. I am never able to get rid of the feeling, that this is my last chance to see Yuma. The border patrol officers are polite and friendly. They ask us to prepare our IDs. I am deeply and truly amused by this check-up. I try to imagine, what could have made me take a route so close to the border if I were in the country illegally. Probably, I would go as far from the borders, as possible. Wyoming, Missouri, Nebraska. Colorado. Colorado will do. The border patrol officer heads towards me. “Are you a citizen?”, he asks me, a standardized question he probably asks a hundred times a day. I smile at him: “I am a citizen, of Ukraine”. He smiles back and takes my passport. I am very definitely very white, I very definitely wear glasses - which makes people think I am very definitely intelligent - and, after opening my passport he very definitely sees the type of a visa, issued for the students of the funded by the US government programs. Yey, man, I was let in by the State Department. Of course, he can indulge me a little joke about my citizenship. “Do you want to see my immigration form?” I ask. The visa allows me to enter. The form allows me to stay and to roam near the Mexican border on this god-forsaken bus. “No, you’re good”, he answers, still smiling at me. He and his colleagues then turn to the Latino men. No more smiling, just a revision. Some of the men, unlike me, are the US citizens. They are being asked for their IDs, and, on the top of that, they are being questioned on why are they going to Phoenix, on their final destinations, on their jobs and places of habitancy. Eventually, after the non-smiling part of the revision is over, our bus takes off. Me, and a bunch of the Latino men, who were suspected just by their looks, continue our journey through the darkest night I have ever seen. The darkness mercifully covers Mexico, where I’ve never been, blurs the border, and cloaks our bus: me, Latino men, their IDs and my Eastern-European passport, which is for the first time in my life overruled by my white skin.