Lisboa 2022
a traveler's entitlement turned to disillusionment turned to acceptance
The first time I went to Lisbon was the first time I went to Europe, which was a dangerous place for me; I had barely turned eighteen and, as a product of American suburbia, the idealized romanticism of Europe seemed to me as credible as the belief that reality could truly be eclipsed by romance. Needless to say, I was immediately awash with an excitement that compelled me to point out every structure and marvel at every new sight. There was proof of some mystical character in the gaps between the lively azulejos tiles adorning centuries-old buildings; there were imposing towers that would suddenly appear like hefty beanstalks, sprouting from the eroded cobblestone streets. When I walked along the water, everything sparkled. Portugal’s capital city revealed itself like a shell from the sea–– smooth and delicate, lovingly molded by the waves and the winds. Everything I witnessed registered like a sigh of relief, as if I was right where I needed to be.
The second time I went to Lisbon, I was on the cusp of turning twenty-three, living in Spain and working as an English teacher. I had come with two friends, Alex and Honor, and I was determined to share the wonder of the city with them, still naively believing in a place’s control over the wonder it possess.
A few hours after we landed, we found ourselves en route to Bairro Alto–– a cobbled network of bars and clubs that is a favorite amongst Erasmus students on holiday. We entered the thick of the drunken crowd right when it turned midnight. Honor showed me the time on her phone as a gesture of celebration. She hugged me and wished me a happy birthday, commencing the type of singular attention others bestow upon a person enduring their birthday; the kind that carries within it the implicit pressure or general expectation that one should joyously celebrate another annual journey around the sun. Yet, the anniversary of the beautiful spring day when I’d been born all those decades ago began with the same melancholic blend of self-pity and sense of personal failure that languishes in my psyche every April. I hugged Honor back and we continued on.
In the bar we entered, I tried to dance while ignoring the sweaty skin of strangers touching me, but I was moving like I was at the bottom of a pool, my ears full of water and my lungs full of breath. My phone started going off and I saw a college friend was calling. I finished my drink and proceeded to fight my way through the people huddled in the bar’s narrow entryway. Outside, I went to stand against a wall in an alley located at a negligible distance from the drunk partygoers, and tapped the green button on my screen.
“Hey, just calling to say… happy birthday! Sounds like there are a lot people over there.”
“Thanks. Yeah, haha.”
“Where are you right now?”
“Lisbon.”
“Ooh, your favorite! How is it?”
“Good, but we just got here, so.”
“Well, it sounds fun.”
I responded with an affirmative grunt.
“Anyway, I won’t keep you. Happy birthday again!”
We said bye and then I went to the bar to announce my departure for the night. I didn’t have a key to our hostel, but I walked back with two girls who were in the same room as us. They used their key to open the room’s door, and I dove face-first into the bottom bunk I’d claimed for the duration of our stay. A few hours later I took sleepy notice of the drunken soft steps and considerate whispers of my friends returning.
On the sunlit morning of my birthday, I set out for a park called Miradouro de São Pedro de Alcântara. I turned left down a narrow street made up of squared cobblestones and slippery tiling. The street wound up at a slight incline, and I walked past vibrant, eccentric graffiti on my left–– a white fish with pink and yellow scales had long, muscular legs and a round orange eye that looked back at me in a kind of startled embarrassment; a magenta unicorn with a windblown purple mane stood confident in a power pose, using its brandished round belly, its toothy smile, and the sparkle in its eye to send mischief in my direction. On my right were overgrown weeds out of which popped stray cats who avoided the entreating clicks of my tongue. Internally I tried to nurture a kernel of optimism and neglect an urgent desire to rush to tomorrow.
I turned right up a hill that, after this trip, would always be familiar to me. It looked beautiful and glossy from the bottom and from the top, but in the middle it was unfairly steep, and the jagged, upturned corners of its gleaming, cream-colored cobblestones erupted from the ground in a show of demand for careful, attentive steps. The aged yellow tramcar that ran parallel to my climb moved only marginally faster than me, so I could plainly see its old gears exerting themselves or look through the windows at the faces of the cramped tourists inside. I wanted to tell them it was my birthday, so they couldn’t take notice of my red complexion or the untameable whisps of hair stuck to my sweat-strewn face, but it just wasn’t possible.
When I finally made it to the park, it was early enough that the food stands advertising fresh juice, sweet-smelling malasadas, and some kind of pork-heavy Portuguese delicacy were still being set up. I was sweating, and already the sun was up to its dirty tricks: it blazed directly through my cotton dress, heated up the flat plane of hair leading into my ponytail, and aggravated the privileged view of Lisbon’s numerous hills rolling up and down throughout the great expanse of red cobbled roofs. I looked down to the lower level of the park. Wide dirt paths weaved between patches of lush green grass; long black park benches had the sunlit sheen of an eel and seemed to pulse with the day’s heat; the busts of people presumably of historical repute sat atop tall, white bases and were spread throughout the grounds. All of these components spanned across a great precipice bordered by a wrought-iron fence–– the only thing preventing it all from being swallowed by the urban depths below.
In a polaroid Alex later took from the upper level, I am sitting on one of the benches, suspended forever in the midst of the pedestaled sculptured heads erected in honor of people apparently worth the effort. Fountains made of aged marble are carved into the wall to my left, and the lions’ heads that adorn them contribute a muted ferocity to the photo. Oblivious to the surrounding grandiosity, my head is instead bent toward the book in my lap. I thought re-reading The Secret History would reveal some inner brooding artistic merit that might justify the persistent malaise that plagued me that sunny morning in Lisbon, but I was just as wrong as I’d been every other birthday. All the book gave light to was that I, like Richard, tend to lend a romantically skewed perception of places and people I believe to be incumbent in my personal evolution, a habit born from a stubborn insistence that my personal story can only be validated by storied places, by storied people, rather than recognition or even curiosity about whatever internal power I, too, might possess.
Of course, some overt romanticism is always due when gentle sea breezes carry lilting laughter throughout the blue sky. After surreptitiously taking the polaroid, Alex and Honor called my name and I joined them so we could walk to Mercado de Santa Clara, located near enough to the water that every inhale carried with it the palpable scent of saltwater. The gleam of the sea reflected the seemingly never-ending bustle of merchants trying to rein in the hefty flow of passerby. We perused various tents, becoming increasingly captivated by the hodgepodge offerings of objects once new, but now were artifacts of times bygone. All the while we were trying to communicate in a faulty blend of English, Spanish, and a semblance of Portuguese, trying to gauge the price of cassette tapes for obscure 1960s American film soundtracks, or where the vendor had found a jewel ring whose intricate design was still visible through the rust on its band.
I’d wanted everything, but after scouring through piles and piles of discarded vintage clothes and thumbing through stacks of the cracked surfaces of beautifully designed azulejos, I left with a gorgeous red gown for only five euros (“cinco?!” I’d said, handing over the bill in disbelief), a tiny ashtray engraved with two men still in their workboots sitting down to dinner, and two pairs of sunglasses I would lose later that summer.
The rest of the day was spent at Costa de Caparica, a nearby beach where Alex surfed while Honor and I tanned, appreciating the skill of the bare-chested boys playing soccer nearby. When Alex came out, I bought a surf lesson for the next day and we walked to a restaurant on the beach boardwalk to eat burritos.
Later that night we got lost, hopelessly wandering the streets for a sign of a rooftop bar that would have provided the perfect setting for my vintage dress to be appreciated. When we eventually found it, there were so many people it was impossible to sit down, let alone be granted a space to take in the view–– which, in the night, was a dismal disappointment compared to what I’d seen at the park that morning. There wasn’t much else to note, except the drinks were fine and everyone was wearing jeans.
We then made our way back to Bairro Alto, hoping for fun in an Irish pub called Cheers, like the one I used to walk past as an undergraduate in Boston. We left soon after security had to throw out a bothersome and overly tactile group of men, reminding me of a lesson I thought I’d learned at other Irish pubs. Now at a loss, we meandered through a crowd that was increasingly becoming more drunkenly boisterous. We stumbled upon a bachelor’s party, where I was lucky enough to sign the grinning groom’s shirt with a tasteful “Congrats” plastered across a tracing I’d done of his buttcheeks.
We then came across a bar without a name. Outside that bar were two lanky boys smoking what we thought was a spliff, but once we found out it was a cigarette we were forced to stew in our disappointment further as the two of them engaged us in conversation. We learned the tiny one with the buzzcut was nineteen, the taller one with a chipped front tooth was twenty-two, and they were cousins local to the area. They invited us inside the nameless bar. We didn’t particularly like them but we were young girls who wanted to drink more and who wanted something to happen and who knew when we felt a pull on our line, so we didn’t say no.
The nameless bar was like any other––wooden bar to the right, its bottles neatly aligned on stacked shelves and sparkling with the reflected overhead light, and wooden floors leading to a spacious dance floor that was bereft of any dancers. In fact, the only other people there besides the five of us were an American couple to whom the bartender had given the aux cord. The bartender now smiled at us, asking what he could help us with. I don’t remember what we drank, but I remember the bartender’s name sounded like if Paul was pronounced like “pole.” Paul was friendly and gave us free shots and I was even given aux to play some of my personal birthday hits. I felt like I was spinning absently through a moment stretched by liquor and careless dancing and heady diversion, so I couldn’t say how or when we got back to the hostel.
When I awoke the next morning I had an Instagram DM from the taller cousin: “Good Morning, Freckles <3.” I laughed so hard I cured my hangover.
We rose early to climb the hill and drink fruit smoothies at the Miradouro before getting into a Bolt taxi headed to Costa de Caparica. Once we got there, Honor looked for a perfect place in the sand to read while Alex and I made our way to the surf shop, where she rented a board and I checked in for my lesson. It was my first lesson in years, but I felt confident, tuning into a current of optimism left over from the previous night. I joked with the Ukrainian women to my left as we spread our arms out wide and did shoulder rolls; I lightly flirted with the surf instructor as he corrected my form; I expressed the right amount of envy when two British girls told me they’d booked lessons for the whole week. I caught a wave and felt an athletic thrill when people commended me on it.
After the lesson, Honor was waiting for me at the surf shack, eyes brimming with concern behind her glasses.
“Where’s Alex?”
“She’s had to go to the hospital, she has to get stitches.”
“What happened?”
“She said after she caught a wave she jumped off her board, or something, and it, like, hit her in the face.” Maybe the force of the memory was too strong, and that’s why her eyelids buckled and she looked abruptly at the sand beneath our feet. When her eyes returned to meet mine a second later they possessed new depths. “There was a lot of blood, so we came back here and they said she’d have to go to the hospital.”
I imagined Honor, already uneasy around the ocean and surfing as a concept, looking up from her book to see Alex, disoriented and with blood dripping down her dazed face, making her way over, feet dragging in the sand. I imagined Alex, a life-long surfer, feel her shock give way to dread as she asked if she still had any teeth; her relief give way to fear as she could only feel the physical pulse of the pain. I had a sudden image of me, a short walk away having my lesson, falling off my board into the ocean only to come back up with a laugh on my lips.
“Oh, shit.”
We ate burritos, watching the flow of families, surfers, and groups of friends walk up and down the boardwalk in their sandy feet. Alex kept us updated with her progress by periodically sending us selfies of her face: the underbag of one eye was swollen and tinged blue, her nose was red and inflamed, and her lips looked as if they’d been inflated with air. When it was time to pick her up from the hospital, Honor called a car and I bought two fruit juices so Alex could finally have something to eat.
Alex was waiting out front in just the red bikini she’d bought at the market the day before and she had a pharmaceutical bag of medicine clutched in one hand. When we pulled up, she swiftly opened the car door and got in. Her face looked as photographed, except now her lips had twelve stitches. When she tried to drink from the straw in one of her juices, the pain was too much that she couldn’t do anything but stare at the cups in her lap, the liquid inside them going flat and a pile of pulp gathering at the bottom of each.
The sound of her crying filled the space of the tiny taxi, translating her physical hurt into a sonic sting. We sat there, stunned at this unexpected detour in our trip, and, at least on my end, stifling a tiny sense of annoyance. The trip to Lisbon was meant to follow a simple formula–– walk around, shop, get drunk, and flaunt the attributes of our youth–– and yet we were forced to contend with an event replete with more consequences than any we’d encountered in our dreary routines back home.
At least she didn’t have a concussion.
The next day, we walked an hour from our hostel. The sun mercilessly tormented us by reflecting off of the glittering tiles into our eyes and shepherding us from one side of the street to another in search of a shady refuge. The hills we climbed were arduous and disorienting, so the streets never appeared to run flat or straight. Passerby openly gaped at Alex’s face before gingerly touching their own lips. The heat-stricken city felt both still and restless, textured with a lethargy and urgency, and after the day before there was the kind of vague, foreboding tension one tends to ignore when traveling in the city she had chosen to represent her romantic idealizations.
None of it was enough to deter us. Sweat dripped down our faces and stained the fabric beneath our armpits, but we trudged forward, determined to set the trip back on track, whatever that meant at the time. It nearly veered off course, however, when we ran into the tall cousin from a few nights before. He was on his way to work, but he managed to squeeze out some minutes to talk to us and ask Alex what happened to her face. Her voice came out soft and she grimaced a little at the effort, but she told him.
“And so now I’m using those little sample spoons––you know, the ones you get at a gelato shop?” He nodded, and Alex let out a little laugh before continuing. “Yeah, so I’m using those to eat, and some syringes from the pharmacy to drink.”
“Damn. Well, maybe we can go out later.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
We said our goodbyes and went our separate ways.
The warehouses comprising LX Factory were originally built in the 1800s and utilized to house the production of a prominent, successful Lisbon textile company until its operations were permanently ceased by the zealous cultural fervor of a deindustrialization movement in the 1980s. The industrial buildings sat empty until 2008 when they, along with the grounds they populated, were converted into the arts district we now found ourselves walking through. Outside, the buildings’ walls were dominated by industrial-style art, like a giant bee made out of spray-painted scrap metal clutching a paint-splattered radioactive green wall. Along a gravel path were boutique cafés and eclectic vendors and a bookstore on the ground floor of one of the warehouses, which featured books in various languages from around the world.
It was there that I picked up The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante and carried it with me to a window seat on the second floor overlooking the multitude of people below. I opened the book and underlined on its first page the words I had the impression, rather, of being at sea, in the middle of the day. I liked its ambiguity: the line invoked a feeling of instability, while also channeling the kind of peace achieved only when one fully surrenders to the whims of an unconquerable force.
I looked out the window at the bustling thread below of young tourists in trendy clothes walking with shopping bags or being served by tattooed waiters with subtle handlebar mustaches and shaved heads. I felt that what I was seeing was no different from what I might see were I to spend a day in Silverlake, Brooklyn, or London. Looking out the window, increasingly absorbed by an odd familiarity, I could have easily been in any of those cities. I momentarily lost sense of place, but what disconcerted me was how comfortable I felt. I had come to Lisbon–– and, truthfully, any other city I had ever traveled to–– in hopes of learning, growing, evolving into a person better than who I was before, someone not available to me by staying at home. Yet, in each city I visited, I found myself in another tired iteration of forced eccentricity, an artificial artistic veneer formulaically applied to a tourist trap–– and I was comforted, grateful to be somewhere I could recognize.
I left the bookstore to wait outside for my friends, who were in a souvenir shop that sold quirky mementos available in a variety of pastels. The heat had curdled my face into a sour expression that was only slightly softened when my friends emerged and we went inside a second warehouse where giant antique elevators waited to carry us between each floor, all of which seemed to have a different artistic theme. The walls of one floor were adorned with frames of crumpled tissues, out of which sprouted metallic structures of genitalia that produced a bubble of laughter from my smirking lips; the bathroom on another floor was made completely green with live foliage covering every inch of surface area–– except for the stall doors, which displayed yellowed pages torn from various novels and books of poetry. Invariably, however, each floor possessed cool shops offering vintage clothes or artisanal jewelry. There were also various boutique creative agencies and different art galleries displaying abstract sculptures or watercolor paintings of fish.
On the top floor we found only an expansive, minimally furnished office with windows overlooking the city. As much as I’d enjoyed the eccentricities of the warehouse, seeing the waves of rooftops and antique buildings expanding to the distant horizon made the deepest impression on me: I really did not want to walk all the way back.
As is typical of most close calls, our night started with us serenely sat at the top of a steep hill. We were watching the city smoothly pocket the sun into its rolling terrain as it readied itself for the moon’s watchful eye. There was a gentle breeze blowing hair in my face, and St. Augustine grass lightly pressing into my bare calves. We were joined by two of Alex’s friends who just happened to be in Lisbon. Once everything was tinged blue by that curious point where nightfall still hadn’t fully absorbed the daylight, we made our way down to street level, walked across a town square, and climbed back up to Bairro Alto, where we stopped in an empty bar promising cheap drinks.
I didn’t recognize any of the drinks on the menu, but everyone around me recommended a Long Island Iced Tea, so that’s what I ordered. Honor ordered something called Head Fucker. Alex’s friends kept it simple with rum-and-coke, while Alex herself, syringe at the ready, ordered three tequila shots. When our drinks arrived, I was elated to take a sip of mine and be met with the absent taste of alcohol and the sweet surprise of sugar. Honor’s mysterious drink appeared as an electric blue liquid in a fishbowl of a cup; it tasted better than it looked, and happened to be too big for her to finish on her own. Alex dipped the syringe into a shot glass, filled it with the glass’s contents, deposited the liquid into the tiny opening in the corner of her mouth, and repeated. Soon, we were all laughing a lot–– at the table where we were sat, at the base of the hill where we said goodbye to Alex’s friends, and in the busy streets we walked in pursuit of something we couldn’t name.
When we found it, the cousins were already outside, smoking with three other friends we didn’t know, but who greeted us with an excitement usually reserved for the familiar. “You made it!” all five of them said, ushering us inside. The bar was empty as before, and I went straight to the bathroom. Once I came out, there was a complimentary shot of the Portuguese liquor ginjiha waiting for me. It was as effective as advertised, and from there the night fragmented and I moved through it the same way I would pass through frames of a bad dream.
My memory is a rapid succession of flashing images: laughing with hands on knees, dancing in a group of people, spinning to reduce the walls into blurs of color. I remember saying “she has twelve stitches” when Honor tapped me on the shoulder so I could witness the cousin with the buzzcut kissing Alex in the corner. An intense bout of curiosity imprinted a vision of a waiter walking through a swinging door, affording a revolving glimpse of scarlet walls and red cloth napkins atop bamboo tables where no one was seated–– had there always been a restaurant connected to the bar? Why were these establishments anonymous and always empty? Weak whispers of questions that were no match for the headiness of my drunken stupor. I continued dancing until suddenly, somehow, I was outside, back atop the hill. The night melted into the fluidity of sound, only able to be navigated by what I could hear–– my giddy laughter, out of breath; the loud crack of cobblestones meeting knees; a feral voice screaming “Get off of her!”; the rustle of fabric as a jacket was released.
We returned to the hostel lobby, where Alex rejected my hug before she and Honor were engulfed in a large group of people with concerned, consolatory faces. I sunk into the cushions of a couch and drunkenly conversed with a volunteer worker until it was time to go back up to our room and fall asleep. A few hours later, I woke from my deep slumber still drunk, which meant whatever reaction I might have had to discovering my phone missing was severely softened. It wasn’t in the pockets of my jacket, nor in my luggage, nor in the pile of clothes that had somehow amassed on my bed, and I was blissfully unconcerned. Alex woke shortly after and with an inebriated snarkiness I asked if she was still mad at me. She burst into tears.
What had slipped through the cracks of my memory was this: we had been dancing at the nameless bar for a long time, all of us save Honor drinking heavily. Paul had kept the drinks coming, and as they entered our system, more and more people entered the bar. We were all having a good time, but once it started getting late Honor corralled Alex and I and led us to the door. As we were leaving, Honor rudely declined Paul’s offer to cook us dinner if we would stay longer, presumably in the anonymous restaurant next door.
We made our way back to the hostel, laughing and singing through the now barren streets of Bairro Alto. I apparently began speaking in Spanish to absolutely no one in particular, but when we arrived at the top of the hill, my incoherent babbling turned into a yelp of excitement. In my frictionless old Converse, I ran partway down the steep hill until I slipped on its glossy cobblestones and my knees were brought down to the ground with a painful cracking sound. I proceeded to slide down the hill like a penguin, my body exposed to every jagged edge and bump that met me on my descent. Once I reached the bottom, I got up with a big smile on my face.
Honor and Alex, however, were hurrying toward me, telling me to run. My antics had apparently caught the attention of a strange man, but in my current state I was unable to comprehend what was occurring. I continued to giddily skip, slowing our group down, drunkenly trusting in that inane assertion that those nightmares we hear about–– young girls getting raped, getting trafficked, being attacked–– only happened to others.
At the bottom of the hill, we were forced to contend with the consequences of my drunken optimism, which was physically proven to be unfounded and misplaced when a hand wrapped around the fabric of my denim jacket. After screaming and yelling and discovering the full efficacy of acrylic nails as a weapon of defense, we were able to get away to the hostel. While I was lost to the delights of an inebriated slumber, skin was being cleaned out of nail underbeds.
Once Alex finished, her eyes were full of tears. I was unable to completely process what she’d just told me–– namely, the danger I had drunkenly ignored–– but I was overwhelmed with a deep gratitude for my friends and relief to be standing in this hostel hallway rather than a European sex dungeon. I gave Alex a peck on the lips. Shock and pain flitted across her face before she dropped to the floor and tenderly caressed her lips.
“What the fuck?” she managed to get out.
“What? You kissed that guy last night, I thought you were feeling better.”
She pointed to the corner of her lips, the only bit of surface area where there were no stitches woven through blood crusted skin. “I only let him kiss the part that didn’t hurt.”
“Oh, sorry. I’ll go get you some ice.”
Still in just an oversized T-shirt, I went downstairs to the lobby. I asked the people eating breakfast if they’d seen my phone, but no one had. I returned to our room with only a cup of ice.
A few hours later, somehow, impossibly, I was still a little tipsy–– but not so much that, as we retraced our steps from the night before to hopefully find my phone, I was oblivious to the bruised pain that resonated throughout my hip bones, collar bones, kneecaps, triceps, and ribs with each step. When we reached the base of the hill, the purported scene of the crime, I wondered what the long-legged fish graffiti-ed into the wall caught with its startled eye. Why had I never thought to ask why the eye was so startled to begin with? Maybe it was because its companion, the purple-haired unicorn, was so adept at projecting trouble onto the hidden corner with the steep hill towering in the background. I started thinking that perhaps the reason those two creatures were graffitied there was because they were mini-gods: the fish stood for incredulity and the unicorn for mischief, two things I chose to believe Lisbon wasn’t capable of spawning. Every scene of beauty, every feeling of wonder generated by this place I decided to steadfastly believe in–– not as features of a multidimensional city, but as solid totems of a mystical land that could transform me into the person I wanted to be, whoever that was.
Lisbon had become a beacon for delusions I was overly reliant on, delusions that I’d engineered to foster the development of my own self-mythology. I hadn’t yet realized it, but I was operating based on a familiar traveler’s fallacy, one that deluded me into believing that to travel was to be given a chance to embody a person disconnected from who I’d been–– or at the very least an overly elated, lighter version of myself. The fallacy enabled my recklessness, bolstered my conviction that no danger could catch me because it wouldn’t know where to find me. It applied logic to the assumption that, away from the monotony of home and immersed in the excitement of a new place, I could escape those haunting periods of malaise or bad temperament or impatience or confused discontent. They would all fizzle into the past, becoming fixtures of the girl I was back home, left behind and forgotten, completely unable to make the leap across the ocean into the present.
But what I’m learning is that to travel doesn’t automatically mean to escape1, nor should it. Rather, traveling, having new experiences, living, is nothing but an elongated contention with myself and those deep inner pits that never see any light when in the comforts of home. Through traveling I’ve learned what I’m capable of; it’s engendered an empowering combination of confidence and indifference crucial to practicing a foreign language or for sticking out like a sore guiri thumb; but most of all it’s reminded me over and over and over again that I am the same, always familiar, never different, ever-evolving.
Walking through Bairro Alto that morning, the sun illuminated various stone buildings, which all seemed more solid when not drenched in the weak buttery light of streetlamps and whose height seemed less oppressive when the rooftops weren’t disappeared by wispy, wet clouds of the night sky. The streets themselves had been rejuvenated with new life. Instead of the drunk monkey calls of inebriated men, we could hear sounds of children screaming during recess at a school we had passed countless times without registering its presence; rather than dense crowds of people huddled in tiny bar entryways, people were moving through the streets, occasionally stopping to wave hello to a shop owner or another passerby as they made their way to their respective destinations. For us, the zone had been nothing more than a hotbed of alcohol, imaginary pleasure, and low-stakes fun, but in the daylight it was all so ordinary and boring, just as any home would be.
We walked a bit more through the empty streets, taking refuge from the sun in the slanted shadows cast by the tall buildings, but we couldn’t find the bar. We didn’t even know what to put into Google Maps. A dull pounding reverberated throughout my head, which was now officially held hostage by a nasty hangover, and I was inclined to believe that the bar had vanished, or never existed.
We made our way back to the hostel, poking good-naturedly in the brush alongside the hill in the off-chance my phone’s black screen might appear under a pile of leaves or from behind an ill-placed rock. It didn’t, but I’d already accepted my fate. Once we returned to the hostel, we packed our bags and called a taxi to the airport, where I had to explain my situation to stuffy Dutch airline officials who printed me a physical ticket to Amsterdam, our next destination.
It was while we were sitting at our gate, waiting to board, that Honor looked at her phone to find a DM from one of the cousins: “talked to paul. there’s no phone at the bar.”
“Oh, great,” I said when she relayed the shocking information. What was more surprising was Alex’s announcement. She’d spent the last few minutes scouring her email for her ticket out of Amsterdam; we were meant to make one last stop in Barcelona before heading back to Valencia, but it soon became evident Alex hadn’t bought a flight to anywhere. This latest development seemed to be on theme for the subtly cursed nature of our trip; but, also, in a way it seemed a twist of fate, as if some divine intervention had caused her to forget this vital detail and now she would be forced to stay in Europe’s weed capital.
But of course this was an error easily fixed. “Ugh, I’m just going to cut this shit short. I’m booking a ticket straight for home,” Alex said, tapping through web pages on her phone. And though we were only a few days into our trip, every part of my body–– from my bruised bones to my pounding head–– was tempted to follow her.
this is where you play “Fuck it I love you” by Lana.
I REALLY love this piece, so so thoughtfully written <3