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 tosay 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.
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
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.
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