By the second night in Portugal, I was fully sick with a sore throat turning into a cough and an achy head. The windmill we stayed in for two nights in the countryside between Porto and Lisbon had heat but no hot shower. A shower head posed over the tiny bathroom—the floor of slitted wood—threatened to rain on everything. I turned the “Q” valve all the way open (quente means hot), but the water just got lukewarm. I turned it off. The toilet lid was rained on, the sink, the walls. I scurried back up the curved staircase to the bedroom and blasted the heat. Outside, the day was beginning in rainy fashion. The clear, color-swept sky of the night before was missing under a shroud of mist and fog. Portugal had disappeared, and the mountain returned to the mountain but nothing else. Allegiance, in nature, never follows our human rules.
Along the coast winding from Cascais to Lisbon, Kees gets a call from a friend who is facing his addiction. The friend tells him this, knowing I am in the car too. I want to give them privacy, but our rental car is my only space. (We pay for the things we’re allowed to claim.) I try to hear the things without passing them through any filter—of compassion, hurt, worry, advice. Out the window, the ocean is on my side. The terrifying blue of Atlantic, the white fluff of crash that spreads in thin lines towards land. The ocean does not meet the land in a straight line. We drive along a road that curves, so new views appear suddenly then are taken away again. I keep opening my window to catch the smell of proximity and take photos with my phone.
We mistake vacations for “living life to the fullest.” We believe seeing more equates living more. But vacations are just escapism. They are so great because we don’t have to live our lives at all. The reason we love going on trips is because we get to be outsiders. We get to observe and consume something new or so vastly different that it is cherished. We celebrate its difference and call it immersion or exploration or experience. We let ourselves think this is what it means to be alive. It’s a part of it—this recognition of life beyond ours, one we cannot describe or imagine without being there and seeing for ourselves. But, I realized, this is not really what I’d call my life. I am not living life more acutely by eating the pastel de nata in Porto, listening to the street musician play his accordion to renditions of Despacito or Ed Sheeran while the shop owner yells at him to move from the front of his shop, though that all feels good. Life is mostly in the things we don’t try to capture, that call for you no matter where you are or how beautiful things look. Life is back home, whatever that comes to mean. Traveling soothes in its removal of us from a place that brings us boredom and pain and mundanity. (Life!) But I believe that the only way we know how to be is through our bodies, so our predicaments will transcend. Perhaps it’s in this overlap of beauty and discomfort that makes an experience worth noting and conquering.
It was strange to be doubly removed. “Going back home” came to mean returning to Utrecht. By the end of the trip, I missed Utrecht and looked forward to starting up classes again, doing laundry, reading on the couch. But part of Utrecht is missing home home, wanting the sanctity of family and friends, the access of things only in the United States. So in Portugal, I came to miss a place of missing. Kinda nice, in its own way.
((Portugal was absolutely stunning, for the record. So many landscapes packed into a small country. I could feel religion encompassing me, just walking down the street or hearing the church bells every hour from our Airbnb. I loved the mountains and the towns built into them. I loved the ocean and the wind and the rain. The people were nice, the city hills were fun to walk down after a rich glass of wine, we ran into Dutch people everywhere.))