Saudade Among Lovers -- Lisbon, Portugal

I was not favored to be born Portuguese. In a way, much of the country is a mystery to me -- the customs, the history, the geography, the language especially.

But what I do understand is saudade.

If you plug that word into Google translate, you get "missing" -- a direct translation for a word that seems not to have one. It is the melancholic remembrance of the way things were, a word for the heartbreaks, big and small, that inevitably follow any sort of significant change. It is a love song for the things you've lost over time. In truth, it's hard for anybody, especially a non-expert like me, to really put into words what saudade is; but it is a universal emotion that somehow hurts and connects. Everyone feels it.

Saudade is what colors the city of Lisbon, spilling into everything from their cobblestones to their street art to the fado music played only in dim lights, where everyone puts down their forks and listens. Saudade is even audible in the cadence of their beautiful, rounded words, so much smoother and softer than the staccato pace of the Italian I have become used to.

Perhaps it is their proximity to this unique brand of sadness that makes the Portuguese people so much gentler than all their European neighbors, or maybe they breathe in the sea air and it soothes them like it does me. Regardless of the reasons, Portugal is kind, with so many offers to help you that there's no possible way you couldn't eventually find your way home. It took a matter of minutes for me to start really feeling things, deep in my soul. My heart opened right up to embrace Lisbon.

I will admit -- I decided to come to Portugal because I had a crush on a boy who had a crush on Lisbon, who lent me a book that explained saudade, and the cobblestones, and the moon, and many other things. I grew to love Portugal independent of my love for this boy, but that's where the love started. So there was already at least some small element of romance in my desire to see Portugal. But once I got there, romance ran rampant. It seemed like I was the only person there alone -- everyone but the children held hands with their lovers. I've never seen so many people kissing in public. (And nothing can make you rubberneck like public kissing. This and car accidents.)

The presence of romance in Lisbon is almost as undeniable as the presence of saudade. This can be no coincidence. And it was this that I came to adore about this beautiful city: it teaches so plainly the inescapable, irreversible, inevitable connection between loss and love, between kindness and sadness, between passion and pain. You can't have one without eventually having the other, and this Lisbon knows well.

But this is not all -- it teaches that there is a sort of beauty in loss. Lisbon tells us that you can be destroyed and rebuilt, one part what you used to be and one part what you've become, occasionally balanced between the two, occasionally being pulled one way, then the other. And this is all a part of what makes you who you are, and it is something we can stop for a moment and marvel at without trying relentlessly to fix it. Perhaps for a moment, Lisbon says, we can let this be what it is, and let you feel what you feel. This is what they write songs about, what they paint on the sides of their buildings, what you see in their eyes and hear in their voices -- that to feel such aching pain means you have felt an equally bright and burning spark of love, or passion, or desire. It may now be beyond your reach, but it once existed; and saudade, when it fills you up, reminds you that to mourn implies that once you had something beautiful and important, something worth having even at the risk of losing. And even though it was temporary, it matters -- in fact, sometimes it is the fact that it is gone that matters the most. "A thing isn't beautiful because it lasts."

Coincidentally, and no arrogance intended, I happened to be a pretty big hit among Portuguese men. More than once I was approached by gentlemen who spoke English with their soft humming accents and bemoaned the fact that I was leaving so soon. One told me that I made him feel like he was stuck in his life, and by the time I'd left the restaurant he'd quit his job to seek something more; one begged me to stay just one more night. And I write about this because this is not something that ever happens to me in the United States, despite what my elderly relatives think -- I don't know what enchanted these men so much, but I was bewildered. I have literally never in my life inspired this much interest among the opposite sex.

With such a breathtaking, indescribable place as a backdrop and with such an odd happenstance as this random host of enamored Portuguese men (plus one Ukrainian), it is no wonder my daydreams became wistful. I began to think in ways that I had not thought in a while. And I allowed myself, finally, to hope -- that maybe, even though I'm a human disaster sometimes, even if I'm still figuring it out, even though I am not always confident and happy and balanced, maybe someone, someday will stop, stand still, and listen to me like one listens to fado. With their whole attention; with all their heart. And maybe all this noise I make will sound like music to them.

And maybe someday it'll be me walking the streets of Lisbon, hand-in-hand with my lover, and he'll waltz me down the cobblestones of Praça do Comércio with the sea behind us, and he'll be afraid to fall in love but more afraid to lose me, and I will be his saudade when I'm gone.