As a trans singer-songwriter, Namoli Brennet explores how explores how the divisions we draw — on our bodies and on the earth — are not fixed truths, but fiercely prescribed constructs. These “lines” dictate who we are allowed to be, where we are allowed to belong, and how we are allowed to be in relation to each other. In “Border Crossing,” Brennet suggests that these borders are ultimately figments of our imagination – real only because we have been told they are and decided to believe that. These “imaginary lines” represent the ultimate barrier to connection, and they often have very real, often violent consequences. They lock us in a constant cycle of “othering” that prevents us from seeing a shared, desperate vulnerability: that we are all, in our own ways, “thirsty,” even as the thing we’re thirsty for may be different.

To sit with the song’s central question — “What separates you from me?” — I have mashed “Border Crossing” with “Stars.” This shifts the perspective from country borders to a cosmic perspective. Zooming out to see ourselves as “one of a million tiny galaxies” doesn’t mean that our lived identities or differences disappear. Rather, it perhaps reveals the absurdity of the walls we build around those identities and differences. If we are all just “stars” hurtling toward an unknown destiny, the borders become incomprehensible. With this arrangement, I do not offer a clean answer; rather, I invite us to hold the tension of being entirely ourselves while remaining, somehow, inseparable from those alongside ourselves. This brings us back to our theme introduction: We have a way so familiar.