Lisboa

The afternoons were hot and hollow. I wondered if I could pass off salty hair for the rest of the night while standing on the balcony in my swimsuit, letting what was left of the 4p.m. sun cast long shadows over my skin before it disappeared behind a crooked cityscape, to only glow for a few more hours and then slip away without much fuss. The passing of day to night isn’t met with resistance. Lisboa doesn’t need the sun to keep going.

We would spend those hollow hours sitting in a table outside a cafe, letting time pass like sand through fingers, carelessly and without purpose. Tudo Bem? How many euros each? Does the cod have bones?  How did everyone in this city right now manage to collide at this vantage point, how is it possible for us to coincidentally all be here at this exact moment when the history of mankind has come so far and has so far to go and the earth is so big, but I am here, watching sardines grill under clothesline in a cobblestone street, two days away from where I was born? These questions rise and fall, merely ripples in the Tagus, prompting motion but dispelling into nothing.

We walked a little bit longer. Let’s take the metro to Chiado and let a thousand languages and a thousand voices fill us while our shoes catch in the cobblestone. Storefronts and restaurant peddlers pulled me in, until I was spat out at the edge of the Praca de Comerc, looking at the lights on the other side of the river, each one a household unto itself. The night is just as sticky as the day, salt and cigarette smoke stuck to me. I stopped shutting the doors and showering promptly in an effort to detangle myself.

Lisbon will go on all night. Long after I am lulled to sleep between paper walls in a house of cards five stories up, on top of the covers with the street spilling into my room through glass doors. Broken stars glittering between the cracks in the cobblestone, crunching slightly underfoot.

Cathedral bells signaled the morning before anyone else did, and so it goes again. A light spring morning rain, making dirty streets dirtier. Echoing whispers in those long Roman halls and steep Moor alleyways. Beautiful and pieced together, tainted by art, history and music.