Touchdown, and the Morning After

Dear You:

Home is such a faraway place now — across the ocean and 13 hours back, with your body strapped in place and the monitor throwing light onto your lap. You cannot sleep. Blue butterflies trail down Cinderella’s ball gown, and Taylor Swift parses the silence with her loving croons, and still you cannot sleep. There is something about the plane that makes you feel as though you have gone to visit the ether and chosen to stay for a while. You cannot tell for certain when you will be back.

In Paris, you sneak eight people into rooms good enough for only four. There is no time to visit the Eiffel Tower when you’re under threat of being kicked out, though you leave your doors open to the hallway because no one is in the mood to stay put, and there’s the sticky problem of who gets to shower first. It works out about as well as it can, with four people bringing up the food, and the other four dropping onto the mattresses after a long flight. The morning after promises the opposite, when all eight of you are rolling out of the hotel with your luggage, trying to avoid attracting attention but getting it anyway, because it is five in the morning and it isn’t possible to explain away the presence of eight people when only four stop by the counter to check out. You hear confusion and anger color the words of the receptionist but you don’t look back; you walk, and you walk, and when you’re out of there you think that perhaps it may have gone a little better.

You’re all pretty sure you won’t be allowed back into that hotel anytime soon. It should be scary, but instead it feels exhilarating, as though your first step towards being fugitives is almost the same as your first step towards independence. Maybe it’s because there’s that certain feeling when you’re shivering in the cold, ill-prepared for temperatures lower than 20 degrees Centigrade. That’s what comes out of living in a country glazed over with heat, year after sunstroke-inducing year. That is the skin you’re wearing, and by the end of this, it may be the skin that you will shed.

In Lisbon, there is nothing familiar about the lilt rolling off of people’s tongues. There is graffiti on the station walls, and you spend your time digging coins out of purses to feed into ticketing machines; and when you’re on the metro line to your rented apartment, you form a clump that’s ten bodies deep, because this is a foreign country and the woman to your left has been eyeing your backpack since you walked in.

It starts to rain when you emerge from the gaping mouth of the station. You put your hood up, and it’s with relief that you notice it’s much warmer here than in Paris. Your host arrives with his hand in his pockets, and you get through the pleasantries — hello, how are you, how was the flight — before realizing that the ten of you can’t fit in his car.

You choose to join those who’ll walk part of the way. It seems like a straightforward enough set of directions, and it’s near enough that you won’t get lost. Much.

You end up lingering by some nameless fountain decorating a roundabout. By now you’ve spent 15 minutes going every which way, at one point convinced that you’re supposed to turn right, and then the next second it’s left. Your companions get tired of walking in circles, and so they run across the street to get to the fountain; and you’re yelling your uncertainty at them, that maybe it isn’t allowed, that you really shouldn’t be in the middle of a roundabout where there are no stoplights and too many drivers. One of them shouts back, “We’re tourists!” as if that’s an acceptable reason — and, well, you can do nothing but laugh, really, even if you feel like the Portuguese drivers are judging your every move, because what your companion says is the truth. And it feels like maybe that statement won’t fly in a court of law if it turns out you really have gone somewhere that you shouldn’t have, but it also feels like it will, that you’re tourists and you know nothing and you’re lost, and so you disregard rational thought to get to a fountain during midday traffic in Lisbon.

It’s fun, to put it in simple terms.

You manage to get back down the right path several photoshoot sessions later, and your host picks you up by the side of the road. The car ride is spent wheedling Portuguese words out of him (obrigado? obrigada? what?) and soon you’ve all settled in the apartment.

(Except for a minor incident involving an elevator that’s hundreds of years old, which moves at a pace similar to the traffic along EDSA on schooldays, and you have to open and close two sets of gates before it can really get going. It can’t carry more than two people, but then four of your companions ignore that and go on it all at the same time. They regret it soon enough. The light bulb flickers on and off, and the elevator keeps stopping, and at some point it gets stuck between two floors. It’s a bit mean, but you rush out to take pictures.)

You head off to the ruins of Castelo de S. Jorge, and your host tells you that to get there, you need to go down the street and then take the tram. But the problem with Lisbon is that the streets go up and down, and somewhere at the heart of it, everything gets tangled up. You and your companions walk several meters along one road, then stop and go back; and this goes on, until you decide that an hour waiting for the tram to arrive is a waste of time, and so you end up hiring tuk-tuk drivers to take you all the way to the ruins. It’s a bit like a hairpin drive, with the climb up so steep and the turns so sharp. Halfway through you smell the sea, and mere seconds after, you see the crests and troughs of its waves. You manage to reach your destination in one piece, though that piece is rattled and shaken up.

There’s a woman playing instruments by the road (you never get to ask what they’re called), and easels of artworks before the entrance to the ruins (picture-taking not allowed, all of the signs say, so you stare at the paintings so hard that you convince yourself your memory can be a photograph, too). You think you spend entire lifetimes taking photographs of the view, of how time and wind and moisture have worn down the rocks, of how there are things that can survive for so long without losing the structure of what they are.

This is the first lesson that you will learn: That there are times when change can eat away at your essence, until all that’s left is a dew-damp, moss-riddled fragment of a being that once dreamed of seeing the rest of the world, and didn’t want to get out of bed on Sundays, and christened the streets with footsteps that never went any way other than forward. Whatever’s left of you will mourn that. But the rest of you will see the change for what it is — a transitory phase, an in-between, bridging you of the newborn eyes and smooth soles with a you that has walked five kilometers to find the bus that will bring you home; that has borne the heavy weight of a camera around your neck and known that the click of the shutter, as it drops down to freeze the moment, serves as a pleasant counterpoint; that has once only read books about these places but has now left your mark. This the person that you are becoming, and all of these differences aren’t such unpleasant things.

When the sun sinks to its resting place, your newborn eyes are no longer as bright and starlike — no longer as innocent — as they once were, but that is alright.

To you, and from you,
there is a sky full of clouds to stroll in.