The pith sticks to the underside of my fingernails, a bitter white residue that smells of artificial sunlight and fluorescent bulbs. I am sitting at a desk that has seen 47 years of mid-level administrative despair, and I have just achieved something that feels more significant than the 107 applications sitting in my ‘urgent’ tray. I have peeled a Navel orange in one single, unbroken piece. It lies on the laminate surface like a discarded snakeskin, a perfect spiral of citrus oil and memory. To my left, the clock ticks with a rhythmic thud that suggests time is not a river, but a series of heavy doors closing in a hallway that never ends. It is exactly 4:07 PM.

The core frustration here isn’t the lack of resources, though that is a constant 27-percent drag on our collective efficiency. No, the real poison is the realization that the system is designed to reward the most hollow version of a human being. The more you erase of yourself, the easier you slide through the narrow apertures of the law.

We are told that resilience is the ultimate virtue for those seeking a new life. This is a lie. Resilience is just a fancy word for the thickening of scar tissue. When you have been moved through 37 different temporary shelters, you don’t become stronger; you become harder to touch. You lose the ability to feel the texture of the orange peel. You become a smooth stone, skipped across the surface of a society that refuses to let you sink in and find a home at the bottom.

I’ve seen Hans H. try to soften this for them. He once spent 77 minutes explaining the nuances of a single clause in a document that was essentially a 407-page suicide note for a family’s cultural heritage. He thinks he is helping. I think he is just applying a very thin layer of grease to the gears of a machine that eats people.

There is a specific kind of silence that happens in this office when the heaters kick in. It’s a dry, dusty sound. It reminds me of the time I spent in a transit hub where 1007 people shared a single functional tap. You learn to measure life in drops. Here, we measure it in signatures.

We started this work thinking we would be the architects of new beginnings, but we have become the janitors of lost causes. Integration is often just a polite word for disappearance. If we do our work perfectly, these people will eventually blend into the grey background of the suburbs, their 17-syllable names shortened to something easier for a barista to yell out. It feels like a betrayal, yet we do it every day for $777 a week after taxes.

He had even bookmarked a page about FUE hair transplant London on a borrowed laptop, hoping that if he could just look like the man he used to be, he might start to feel like him again.

I am the man who watches Hans H. lie to people for their own good. We are all just trying to maintain some semblance of a whole, even if it’s just a strip of zest on a dirty desk. The deeper meaning of this work-this Idea 16, as the training manual callously labels it-is that we are not resettlement advisors. We are taxidermists. We take the skins of people’s lives and stuff them with the hay of bureaucracy so they can stand upright in a new country without looking too dead.

Hans H. picks up the orange peel and holds it to the light. He is looking for gaps, for places where the knife might have slipped. There are none. It is a perfect, continuous loop. He looks at me, and for a second, the mask of the advisor slips. He looks like a boy who just saw a magic trick he can’t explain. We are all waiting for someone to prove that things can stay together, that the center can hold, that a life can be moved from one place to another without being torn into 177 jagged pieces.

The relevance of our struggle isn’t found in the success stories that the PR department likes to circulate. It’s found in the small, weird obsessions we develop to keep from screaming. Hans collects stamps from countries that have ceased to exist. I peel oranges. We are both trying to find a version of the world that makes sense, one that doesn’t require a 37-page explanation of why a child born in a neutral zone doesn’t officially exist.

The frustration is a slow burn, a 7-watt bulb flickering in a basement that is slowly filling with water. You don’t notice you’re drowning until you try to take a deep breath and realize there’s nothing but paperwork in your lungs.

Hans puts the peel down. He goes back to his desk. There are 27 more people in the hallway. I can hear them shuffling their feet, the sound of 27 pairs of shoes that have walked 107 miles too many. I take a bite of the orange. It’s sharp and cold. It tastes like a mistake I’ve made 47 times before, but I keep chewing.