For El Salvador, I real Solito, a gut-wrenching memoir by Javier Zamora about his harrowing journey to the United States as an unauthorized immigrant. His parents had already moved to the United States, so he undertook this journey with a group of strangers at the age of nine AND HE DID NOT EVEN KNOW HOW TO TIE HIS SHOES.

That detail really destroyed me as I am the mother of a nine-year-old boy who also does not know how to tie his shoes. As I read through Zamora’s ordeals, I kept thinking, How could my son do this? At nine? How?!?! Zamora’s memoir brought me right into his agonizing border crossing and every chapter, sometimes every page, I felt my heart breaking again.

Immigration has been a pervasive theme in my Read Around the World quest. A short story in Uncertain Kin (The Bahamas) completely altered my understanding of the immigrant experience. American Visa (Bolivia) is a madcap novel all about a man’s desperate attempts to join his son in Florida. Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe (Bulgaria) is a work of nonfiction that deftly weaves together the author’s personal journey through the borderlands of Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece with the stories of people who desperately tried to cross those borders. The theme of immigration also popped up in my picks for Belarus, Benin, and Burkina Faso — and that is just the B countries!

Since the beginning of my quest, I have been pondering the meaning of words like “country” and “borders” and “immigration.” Yet maybe “pondering” is not the right word, because “pondering” suggests a mental activity, but this is more than an intellectual exercise. This “pondering” is something I feel in my body in the way my blood moves and my skin tingles, the pressure of some unknown force pushing against my skull, a tightening of muscles in my neck and shoulders, and in my lungs and throat and breath. It is more poetry than prose, and as I write this, I worry that I am not articulating my feelings about immigration coherently — but perhaps that is my former life and training as a lawyer kicking up? Back in my lawyer days, I worked on several pro bono cases for immigrants seeking political asylum, and perhaps that has influenced this compulsion I have to support any statements I have about immigration with evidence, laws, and statistics but UGH, I do not want to talk about immigration from the perspective of a lawyer or a politician.

I want to talk about it as a human.

And as a human, my heart breaks when I read about the difficulties that people like Zamora face when they try to leave their country. Why are we bound and divided by invisible imaginary lines? Why is this such a polarizing political issue?

I don’t know all the answers about immigration. Hell, I don’t even know all the “right” questions. I don’t know all the statistics and I don’t know how immigration impacts the economy, but I do know that Zamora’s story broke my heart. What would happen if all the politicians in Washington, D.C. read this memoir before they issued decrees and laws about “illegal immigration”? Have any of those politicians considered their family trees and their immigration roots? What makes their immigration story legal and Zamora’s illegal?

Solito raises a lot of uncomfortable questions, and it left its fingerprints all over my heart. May my heart, mind, and soul get filthy with the fingerprints of authors like Solito, and may I carry their stories and let them change the architecture of my soul.

I might be starting to understand why my Muse was so insistent that I undertake this quest.