when all the borders opened back in 2060, it was like a return to the great city of babel, they said. it represented a unification of the species, one collective step forward in bringing the people's of the earth under one roof, one tree, one city. the citizens of the world spoke in one voice, one language, and said in unison that nothing would scatter us again. i recall my mother telling me stories of the fall of the berlin wall and the crumbling of the iron curtain. i remember the exhilaration in her voice, the sense that all was possible. and suddenly there at the tail end of my own life, there it was again: perestroika. the great thawing of the earth.

you were hardly an infant when it happened. you don't know a world where people weren't free to roam, to live and work where they pleased. but for most of my life, people were bound to the states in which they were born, help captive like children and exploited for their labor and consumption. but opening the borders made the state just like any other service you would engage with, and in exchange for your taxes and abilities, you were right to expect a certain degree of services. i had many friends who migrated to western europe because they had a better pension system. others came here to the states because they thought our healthcare services were better. still other friends of mine left to settle in the cheaper arable lands of the indian subcontinent, to spend their lives tilling fields, raising sheep, watching the night jasmine grow.

the language issue was not as difficult to overcome as all that. even then the r1 tympanic translators were widely available and becoming cheaper. back then they were the size of a hearing aid, nothing like the tiny subdermals you have today. this allowed people from all walks of life to meet as if for the first time. i lived at the time with my partner in a third floor walkup. in our building alone there was another queer couple from the ukraine, there were two brothers from ghiana, there was the doctor and his wife from sri lanka, that young man and his mother from a small town in siberia. there was the old man and his wife from south africa, the woman with her three children whose husband had died, they were from colombia. we used to have get-togethers on the roof of our building in rogers park where we could look south at the city skyline. and we would share stories of our people, of our history, and we would come to understand that we had been lied to, made to fear people with whom we otherwise had much in common. it was like we had been living without a bubble or behind a great wall our entire lives, and now that the wall was down, we would never return.

even then, my partner and i were not young men anymore. still, we thought we would be remiss to skip out on the opportunity to see the world a bit. so we both applied for IMA visas and took random jobs in all sorts of places: we were dishwashers for a time in cyprus at one of their elite vacation resorts; then we worked as custodians for an apartment building in prague; we picked japanese pears in Fukushima and for a whole year we did not work at all, but walked the mountain trails of nepal, taking refuge at the monasteries along the way.

alas, freedom is like an amphetamine high. its initial effects are intense but decline over time as tolerance builds. you and your generation were born into it. to you, it is just the way the world is. but for us, such ways of being in the world were not always the case. i hope for your sake that the walls stay down, that the people stay free to move, to work and to love as they please. that you should know all the peoples of the earth, and they, you. all great journeys end in a return. you will know this one day, if you do not already know it now.