55°16'40.5"N 20°58'54.8"E

We stood on a sand dune that shifted under our feet, soft and pale like the skin of a body. From here, the lake stretched out like a patient mirror — Vištytis, they call it — and across its glinting surface lay the edge of Russia, or more precisely, the Kaliningrad Oblast, that geopolitical orphan severed from its mainland, anchored in a mosaic of Baltic contradictions.

This dune, deceptively still, was in fact always moving. The wind etched patterns into its skin, calligraphies erased by the next breeze. A shifting ground, as unstable as the borders it overlooked. It was here that I learned the lake itself was once a cartographic dilemma — before the 2003 treaty, even a swimmer could accidentally cross into Russian waters. The idea of sovereignty, of state, seemed absurd when the border was drawn over the very element that resists being grasped.

The sand beneath us was made from crushed epochs: glacial retreats, footsteps of merchants and soldiers, smuggled goods, the exhale of treaties. In 2015, the 572nd boundary marker was planted nearby, a fixed object meant to tame an unfixed world. But even that marker sinks, ever so slowly, into the earth.

Behind us, the forest. In front, the lake. And between them, this dune — not a monument, not a wall, just a temporary elevation — reminded us that all borders are built on impermanence. That the wind keeps sculpting the place where history forgets to settle.