Closer than it felt: two lines from home
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This is for day 2 of the #30DayMapChallenge: Lines.
It’s about one of my own biases. On 24 February 2022, I happened to be in Lisboa when Russia started its full scale invasion of Ukraine.
I grew up in the ’80s, towards the end of the Cold War, when the Iron Curtain still divided Europe. That division left a mark on my mental map: Eastern Europe felt like somewhere far away, not just across a border but in a different world. Even long after those borders opened, some of that sense of distance stayed with me. If I don’t have a map in front of me, Kyiv still feels farther from home than Lisboa, even though the geography says otherwise.
