Crying in bookstores, thinking of borders

Today, I teared up in a bookstore. Today, I bought a book because the first two paragraphs of its final chapter made me feel like crying.

cover of the history book Borderlines by Lewis Baston, featuring an old photo of a border checkpoint

I picked it up and leafed through it to kill time, and because the title, Borderlines, caught my eye. I picked it up with some cynicism, wondering what this book might have to teach me about borders. I went to the last chapter, ‘The secret capital of Europe (Ukraine/ Romania)’ because I was curious what this book had to say about a border that tore hearts in half in my family. I read the first paragraph and I felt like crying.

Cernăuți (Chernivtsi) was my paternal grandparents’ birthplace, a home they fled under duress as young people, and where they never returned. A childhood home my grandmother spoke of often, when I went to visit her in the summers. These few lines, read by chance today, seemed to echo her words. Her voice, and not the writer’s, filled the page under my eyes.

photo of the first page of chapter 18 of Borderlands, titled 'The secret capital of Europe' — Lewis Baston, *Borderlines: A History of Europe in 29 Borders* (hodder press, 2025)

I wrote my poem, ‘One last journey’ (the other side of hope, vol. 4.1) in her memory, thinking of what it must have been like, leaving your home, your family, and everything you’ve known behind as men with war in their hearts once again alter the shape of your world.

black and white photo of two young women walking down a city street, wearing fashionable 1930s clothes and hairstyles; the writer's grandmother and her grandmother's friend — My paternal grandmother, Silvia, walking down a street in Chernivitsi with a friend.

Years after my paternal grandparents had both passed away, my parents made plans for all of us to go visit Chernivtsi for the first time, to trace the footsteps of my grandparents’ younger selves down streets that we knew only from their stories. Then the pandemic hit and we had to put it off. Then, Russia invaded Ukraine and we had to put off this reunion across the decades indefinitely.

Thus it was that, picking up a book at random in a listless moment, I found myself fighting back tears in a little bookshop in a quiet seaside town more than 1,400 miles away from where my grandparents started their lives’ journeys.

I am tired of tyranny, greed, and borders seared with violence, borders that shift with the desires and interests of small-minded men.