July 2024. The sensation of wheels grazing the asphalt, the plane swaying slightly before finding its balance and delivering its passengers back to solid ground it's always the same. No matter the latitude, the continent. What changes is that first breath of air after two, three, four, or more hours of pressurized flight. When I stepped out over Porto (Portugal) in July, from the stairs of a budget flight, a cool breeze - chill compared to the sweltering 38 degrees in Italy - shook me from a state of existential torpor. A shiver started at my back and rippled in a heartbeat through my body. The weight of anxiety cracked, and only then, inside, I felt a warm surge of freedom.

I didn’t yet know that within a few hours, I would begin to glimpse myself in the mirror, reflected in the streets and buildings of a city that had, until then, been “unknown.” That the bright sky would soon turn grey, and a light rain would begin to saturate the air. In a few days, after nearly thirty-four years, I found myself.
Found in a slow, melodic, and unfamiliar language. In the fracture between past, present, and future that filled the frame of a window overlooking the Boavista neighbourhood. In the humble Portuguese meals. In the melancholic eyes and silence of people who, seemingly grumpy, would later reveal themselves to be warm and welcoming. In the diversity woven from sounds, gestures, colours, and scents. In that dizzying sense of vertigo, hand in hand with someone, on the heights of the Dom Luis I bridge. In the voice of a young singer-songwriter who entertained a laid-back crowd at sunset. In the countless churches, parks, and streets that climbed and fell.

In the midst of all this, I met myself.

“I don't believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it's about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.”
Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone