How I Chased a Cinema in Portugal
A walk through Alfama opened my eyes after a long time of having them sealed shut
About two months back, I went on a week-long vacation to Portugal. My sister Allie was studying abroad and living in Lisbon, so my parents, my other sister Jamie, and I flew over for a visit.
I have a lot of stories from this trip, and I’m sure I’ll tell them in due time. For now though, there’s one in particular that I’d like to share.
It was quite late on the trip. I stayed in Lisbon for a few days to round off the journey, and I don’t think I realized its significance until recently.
I don’t think fondly of the person I was during this trip. I was months deep in a depression, and it was ugly. Was I working on it? Yes, but still, I’d sporadically detach from conversations to sulk and kept barring myself from sincerely living in the moment.
At least, I made myself write down observations about the people and places which forced me to take in my surroundings to some degree. That process created a lot of writing material, for when I would finally strike out my writer’s block.
It wasn’t enough though. Self-sabotage won out daily. I still need to properly apologize for the way I behaved, but that’s not the point of this piece.
Allie had made a reservation at a restaurant for us on the last night of our vacation. It was situated in Alfama, the oldest part of the city. We got there early, and killed time by walking around as a family for a while.
With forty-five minutes until our reservation, everyone split off on their own for a little personal exploration before dinner. It was then that I saw something painted on the wall that gave me direction — a goal.
I followed the arrow down the steps, feeling like I was on the kind of quest you might find in a shitty open-world RPG. There were some twenty-somethings talking loudly as they stumbled down the steps. I quietly ambled past them.
I saw a weird art piece of two brains with wifi signals coming out of them on the wall. I thought little of it and moved forward. I came to the bottom of the steps, and looked down both ends of the street to which they spilled onto. The right path was familiar, and thus I knew my destination was down the left path.
As I sped walked down the sidewalk at the same pace as the average suburban mom (not really, honestly I only see them do that on TV. Suburban mothers need better representation!), I passed what seemed to be a small art gallery, closed for the night. It seemed cool, but I feared distraction could lead to overthinking, and so I pushed on.
I love film, and as of late, I’ve especially admired foreign ones. It’s pretentious, I know, but I can’t help it. That burning desire for art that isn’t in English overtakes me sometimes, and I’ll go crazy for films like Tetsuo: The Iron Man or The Platform.
Once more, I was under that spell, and even though I wouldn’t have the time nor the funds to actually see any Portuguese films, I could at the very least say I went to a cinema during my 8 days abroad.
I don’t think of myself as a very braggy person, but there will always be a part of me that gets excited to tell people about obscure or foreign media I’ve consumed, so that was more than enough reason to jog forwards.
Looking back, I don’t entirely know why I trusted that sign as much as I did. I’m rarely that gullible, a result of my father’s constant tricks and pranks along with my trust being broken a few too many times.
If I believed in fate I’d say I was meant to search for that theater and begin my true recovery. I don’t believe in fate though, so let’s be real here.
I was sleep-deprived as all hell and wanted to believe that I could find a cinema no matter how unlikely it was. Unfortunately, I couldn’t believe that lie for very long.
After about 10 minutes of light jogging, trying my best to tunnel vision on what was promised to me by reputable vandalism, I stopped. I had to accept what I’d likely known for a while at that point: there was no cinema. I had been effectively bamboozled.
I turned back, and began walking. My steps were a lot slower, probably because I felt dejected. However, after about a minute, I started to lift my head up, and halted my internal whines of disappointment. It dawned on me how fucking stupid it was to believe a random direction scrawled onto the wall so piously, and I laughed at myself a bit.
I likely seemed a bit off my rocker to the locals. I looked around, half-expecting to see the words “candy store” in neon red in one of the alleys I was passing. It was here that I remembered exactly what part of Lisbon I was in, and how beautiful it was.
Alfama was one of the few parts of the city to survive the 1755 Earthquake that heavily damaged the rest of Lisbon, although it did not make it out unscathed. While the destruction of the city was tragic, the reconstruction of the fallen capital was fortunately quite efficient.
This picturesque neighborhood is emblematic of the rich history it has to its name alone, but also as a beautiful display of street art, both visual and auditory.
As I walked along, observing the art along the walls, I came across the familiar teal door of the exhibit. This time, I stopped and peered into the art exhibit through the broken window pane. There was nothing breathtaking, and I’m not going to lie and act like I saw truly life-changing art in there, but it was still quite nice to look at.
I stood there, crouched over, head practically through the door, for probably five minutes, staring at the different pieces, taking in the work their creators put in with as much reverence as I could. Then, I stood back up straight, hearing my mother’s constant reminders to mind my posture, and continued on.
I decided to go up a different staircase than the one I had originally come from. I heard the strums of a guitar and remembered the live music we heard below us on our group walk about an hour prior. I followed the sound and saw that a new musician had taken a seat on the stool. I listened to him for a good while, probably another five minutes (seemed to be an appropriate amount of time to spend appreciating the arts, at least for my schedule).
I only filmed the music towards the end of my time with it, when I walked up to where we had listened to the music from earlier. I then continued what was now a destination-less journey.
I decided that the majority of these moments I was creating were to be for me alone, not for a camera.
Funny, isn’t it?
I declared that then, and here I am pouring it out for all to see. We do that often, making absolute claims, “never”s and “always”s, only to disregard them as soon as a day later. I used to despise that, but I’ve done a 180 on it.
Change is such an essential piece of humanity, and we can’t change if we never go back on our word.
If I was the man I said I always would be when I was fifteen or sixteen, the world would be just a little bit worse off. There’s a wonder to breaking your own promises, but only sometimes.
I ended my excursion back at the pair of brains I’d seen at the start, entirely incidentally. Keeping up with the theme of the past ten minutes, I stared at them for a while. What was the intent behind such a piece? I may never know for sure, but I’d like to think it represented how constantly connected we are. Not just to the internet, as that’s quite the overdone and frankly shallow sentiment, but to our environments and situations.
We’re always caught up in keeping up, in figuring out (or wallowing in) our problems. It’s so hard to live in the moment, or at least it is for me. Because that moment has a moment after it, and I need to be ready for that. Additionally, there’s the moment before too, which always seems to burrow itself in my head and thoroughly curb stomp my conscience.
I’m probably looking too far into it, but I think the fact that there are two brains instead of one helped me a lot too. Other people have the same problem, and as much as I wish I could deny it to seem selfless, misery loves company.
It hit me then, much later than it should’ve, that I had an amazing company that my misery loves, all four of them walking around Alfama that very moment.
I sat on a nearby bench and began to note down the small observations of my walk, only to see my family leaning against a railing above me about a minute later. Of course, after a long stint of looking around and absorbing everything around me, my family only sees me as I lean my head down to look at my goddamn phone.
I had spent my trip in the beautiful country of Portugal connected to a sadness that had been brewing in me for months. Yet, the fifteen or twenty minutes I had just experienced were different. I don’t think I fully realized this until about a week or two ago, but for the first time in a long while, all that was on my mind was what surrounded me.
All my thoughts were honed in on the art I saw, the music I heard, the people I passed by, and the steps I took. Months of pain had released their grip on the folds and wrinkles of my brain, even if they’d tighten that hold again later on in the day. That brief reprieve was enough to tell me that I could make it through my current struggles, even if it was only subconsciously at the time.
I’m quite well known for being lackluster with conclusions, and I plan to fix that someday soon. Unfortunately, that day hasn’t arrived just yet, so I’ll close it out with a quote like all people who wish they were good writers do.
It’s a question I started asking myself soon after my return to the States.
I’m a bit embarrassed to admit this, but it’s from a show called Sonny Boy that I watched. Feels a bit silly to be so influenced by a line from something I binged on Hulu, but maybe that’s just me. Nonetheless, it helped me, and I hope that’s enough.
“If there were a place that shone brighter than the place you’re at, would you want to go see it? Or would you stay where you are and just keep staring at it?” — Sonny Boy
Thank you for reading my work. I appreciate it a lot.
