In my final weeks in Alberta, as my visa neared expiry, I photographed Nikhil, who immigrated to Canada as a child and, decades later, still does not hold citizenship. His suspended belonging mirrored my own, and the prairie became our stage of contradictions: vast yet exposing, promising yet precarious. On repeated border trips, I witnessed the quiet performances of worthiness demanded by immigration systems, ironed shirts, rehearsed hope, refusals delivered in waiting rooms. Even in the portraits made in fields, Nikhil’s pressed shirt carried this weight. I raised fabric backdrops as fragile architectures: frames that never sheltered, symbols of temporary belonging. At summer’s end, I sold everything I had built in Canada, including the car that carried us to these fields and to the border. This work asks what it means to seek home in landscapes that may never fully claim us.