Finally Found

I announced by various means to very little fanfare that I have been accepted into my MA program at Católica in the past week, which has put the keystone into a creeping perception I've had of the time I'm spending at home in Denver for the short summer period. While I find myself pulled in many directions, I feel like I've managed to steer them all toward the end point that I actually want for myself. I feel almost totally in charge of myself for the first time.

I have a lot to cover in this post, but I'm going to try to write as concisely as possible, because the idea of a drawling blog post irritates me in the current moment.

I flirted with the idea of writing the word home in quotation marks just now, and that's because I find myself now occupying the space of tourist in the city I was born and lived in for twenty years. This may be the last time I live here for a while, or it could be that I'm taking a break for just a year or two. I don't know yet, but the point remains that I am as much a visitor here as I am a resident now, and it is peculiar given the reflexive familiarity of all that is around me. I have blissfully few obligations to fulfill and the presence of mind to actually accomplish them now, and it seems that for all of the strife in determining what I wanted and was going to do with myself, the dust has settled where it needed to. The only downside to the intentionally reduced duration of stay is that I'm finding it near-impossible to find formal employment, which I had intended to secure for the summer months. I am surviving somehow despite that, however, and have gained the perspective of not needing to discontinue my newly-acquired observational habits from abroad while I am here, for there are people in other places who know nothing about where I am from and I am discovering new things to appreciate about being home while giving up on the idea of being landed anywhere in particular.

I have held on linguistically despite the scene changes since Lisbon, my Portuguese suffering not at all despite being immersed in French and then English for extended periods. On the contrary, I felt it more difficult to start the motor, so to speak, with French when I was in Paris, whether for exhaustion, for the sake of continuing to use and think in Portuguese, or for the knowledge and anticipation of speaking English all the time immediately thereafter. I was reduced to a terrible Franglais that is not particularly befitting of my knowledge or capabilities, but given the situation with my friends, it worked out fine. Paris is as much a home for me as Denver or Lisbon as ever, if not more so between all three now as I come into my own and spend more time in each place. So I find that my Portuguese is sufficient that I think and function in it side by side with English much of the time, albeit with obvious shortcomings in some manners of expression for want of vocabulary. It is a peculiar self realization, as I never anticipated overcoming the block I have always had of verbal output, nor in that particular language. Now that I know I can, I will continue on with the Portuguese course I was taking to hopefully build upon that progress.

Being single in the place where I was so desperately holding onto a relationship that was coming to an inevitable, crashing end has been less bothersome than I expected, much as the interactions I have had with the other half of that equation have been. My perspective on being social, aside from the context of a relationship, seems to have shifted with the lessons learned from my Portuguese spring; I have made a more pointed effort to spend time with my actual, longstanding close friends than I might otherwise have, yet I have also pursued meeting new people (read: menfolk) for the sake of taking life by the horns and not getting trapped in an unnecessary melancholy. Without the yoke of feeling like I need to hold onto an intimate relationship in order to preserve that connection, my life feels more dynamic and I feel more in charge of myself. I enjoy myself. I like being single. I don't foresee that changing in the near or even somewhat more distant future. I'm happy to be living my own life and having new experiences without trying to force myself to take root somewhere or in some sort of situation that is not fulfilling for me. That process has come full circle.

Full circle: with the arrival of shitty weather in Denver, that seems to be symbolically fitting of everything happening right now.

Paris

Paris has the unwavering effect of being a place in which I fully realize the profoundly altering moments I seem to experience periodically, be they by chance or simply because there is something about this city that encourages such things to happen. This time is no different, and so it is that I find myself acceding to an unfamiliar place of adulthood, of thinking, and of perspective in how I want to move my life forward. Or at least so it seems that each time I'm here things coalesce into a large step forward–in retrospect, perhaps, not as much.

The point remains however that this time around is no different, and here I am submerged in newfound thoughts come from the end of the financial and social bubble that was my undergraduate education, the idea that at 21 years of age I should probably have an idea of what I am doing or at least want to be doing with myself in the short years to come that I can call myself a twentysomething, and the realization that due to the cozy nature of my undergraduate years, like many others, I am perhaps a bit underqualified for what I am capable of doing. The Portuguese chapter of my life is, with due tidings, not over, as of the submission of my application to a political science master's degree program at Católica, a somewhat ironic (hopeful) return to the university I had so many frustrations with just a year prior. I feel the motivation of the close of my six month period of being a graduated semi-adult vagabond, the end of a placeholder course to keep me doing something with my time, not very much money, and the knowledge that all of these are signs that point to the necessity of doing something in the very near future. I have a couple of months to spend in the United States before beginning to realize more acutely all of the things I've spent so long whinging about on this blog in Europe, so I find it imperative not to sit idle, if for the very simple fact that my bank account quite simply cannot bear that kind of pressure.

There is something to making a break with the college bubble, as I so incessantly refer to it, learning to wean yourself off of a reliance upon others for whatever it may be that you want. This doesn't necessarily refer exclusively to financial means, naturally, but that social life outside of college is also almost radically different: there is none of the ease of meeting new people who have the tendency of fitting into the neat format of your interests, career, or academic path for the simple virtue of taking a class together or having an institutional structure which encourages rapid group formation. No longer actually being engrossed in the grind of serious classes also results in a disconnect between both the exchange students fretting about how to manage partying too much versus studying as well as the working class, those who have left their university years long behind and are actually sustaining themselves independently despite the economic crisis. The financial element is more obvious; despite being an only child, there is an increased reluctance on both parts between me and my parents for me to continue to freewheel in their money, me with the desire for more autonomy over what I'm doing with my cash and them for the simple desire of having more in their own pot to do with as they please. So I find myself in conversations with, variously, Damsel in Dismay and my mother about ways of working in such a manner that can cater to the skills I actually have, whether my experience shows it or not. I'm reluctant to talk about such things, mostly because not a single thing is yet in motion, at least until my "vacation" is over, and also because it's something I would rather look at in retrospect, like most other things.

I have no active desire to spend the next few years in the United States, though I no longer reject moving back altogether. Having as much "downtime" as I did put more into perspective what I want, for want of an institutional structure to tell me what I want, and I've come to see that I do want to spend more time in Portugal, productively though, with the intent of allowing my Portuguese to transcend the barriers of fluency I seem to have been on the path toward. I also want to make something of the connections I have been slowly but steadily building in Paris, with the intent of working here after I'm done with my degree in Lisbon, however unrelated the work itself may be to the degree I will pursue. I need experience more than I need to suffocate myself with the idea of trying to work exclusively in a field that, even in Europe, land of administrators and bureaucrats, is somewhat saturated. Beyond that, I don't know, and I don't need to try to plan my life out ten years at a time. It suffices to say that the motivation I have is driven by a tangible feeling, a desire if not impulse, to expand my horizons and continue traveling to major cities (and a continent) yet unknown, to provide for myself the means to do so comfortably and in the fashion I prefer. It's not going to pay for itself.

My only remaining question is: why is it always Paris? Is there something in the air, the overhyped bread, the finicky weather? Something to the particular smell of the metro, the chirping manner of the French spoken? In any case, I'm not complaining.

Your Train Will Depart Shortly

So it is that I find myself having departed what I have come to refer to as the terra lusófona, the "Portuguese-speaking world", for want of my experiences being limited exclusively to Portuguese people, regardless of the fact that the time spent is, in fact, in Portugal.

I arrived in France, Paris to be more exact, less than 6 hours after finishing the process of packing my bags, loading all roughly 55 kg of luggage into a small car, bidding goodbye those in the old apartment I actually got along with, rushing to check in for my flight, and managing to get through Lisbon's airport security in approximately four minutes. Partly because I left much of my packing to the last minute, and partly out of concern for the weight of my luggage, I had to leave many things behind in Lisbon, left with as amigas at home or in a bag for me to reclaim from a different friend when I return (god willing) in the fall. Emblematic of everything, but actually of nothing, this post will not be a droning elaboration of melancholy, how I feel my life is fractured, or how I somehow left a part of myself in Lisbon. I've expressed all of those sentiments before.

No, instead, what actually has happened is that I haven't had any time to stop and strangle myself in my thoughts, to be overly sad about those left behind, to ruminate about the future, or anything of that sort. The primary thing I've been preoccupied with is the state of my bank accounts, horrifyingly low as they seem, but that's a matter best left off of this blog. I arrived to Paris and schlepped my heavy luggage through the RER, falling down from the unbalance that comes from exhaustion while trying to get my bags off the train and continue along to the metro to get to my friend's apartment. I managed to arrive with surprisingly little difficulty, despite the Parisian metro lacking much by way of assistance for those with baggage or disabilities (the same thing, by the view of some), only to receive the details of a train I would need to catch to Nantes just a few hours later in the afternoon. I was so effectively drunk from exhaustion that I forgot to pack underwear to take with me for the following two days, a very sexy reminder to be perhaps better organized in the future. The point of all of this is that my time is currently being spent so very much in the moment that I find myself doing nothing in particular much at a time, always seeing someone or doing something at the last minute and without hesitations or regard for how it will look in retrospect.

This is the most important lesson from the close of the spring stint in Lisbon, the idea that one must quite simply shed all preconceptions and accept that things happen to much of an extent the way they will happen, without need of being forced or thinking about them too much. Wrapping my head around this concept has not been an easy process, and to say that it was a particularly festive spring, full of merriment and gaiety is to speak utter nonsense. It has been difficult. I have gone through the (admittedly cinematic, at times unnecessarily dramatic) experience of letting go of love from a distance, of losing my social circle and my previously established notions of sociability for an extended period, experienced more of the regrettable poverty that the country finds itself in, and even the weather, as if to say fuck you express its solidarity, has been abnormally awful this year. I am not painting the full picture, as there have been moments of being up as well as down, but the trend was much more downward this spring than upward, as it had been a year ago.

I feel much more at ease as I do what I'm doing in Paris this time around than I did in March, perhaps for the simple fact of having digested all of what happened leading up to now. I managed to finish a book I had been reading for over a year and moved onto another. I am speaking both French and Portuguese without lowering my level or forgetting too much of either one. I have been simply enjoying things to the maximum extent that I can, because perhaps at last that is where I am supposed to be, enjoying my actual vacation for what it is. The sense of calm that had come over me has transformed into a persistent, even insistent tide of good energy which is allowing me to focus my creative energies and think more about the things I want for myself in the future and how to realize them. I'll write a different blog post about that.

I'll miss Lisbon, but I left lacking a particular sense of sadness or melancholy for leaving. That city has become so utterly familiar to me that when I walk around it, it just feels like home. I feel a certain command of the streets, regardless of whether I know them, the kind that only comes from when you have so utterly absorbed somewhere into your sense of being that it is forever a place of home for you. Even my Portuguese has become something I could confidently call fluent, if on the lower rungs of the relatively subjective scale of fluency. I have no fear of chit-chatting with baristas or waiters when ordering food, I do and get what I want when I want it, and I no longer translate things into English in my head. Those left behind will either be there when I intend to be back, or are good enough friends that I have full confidence that I will see them again in the future, in some other new place worth exploring. Até mais, Lisboa.