i’m doing the finishing touches on the walls of a house. who cares it’s built with earth and straw, for sure not the little piggies, their business with the wolf was done, and i did not care either, i was there to forget and to build muscles. after that last tiring workday i went to the sea, i pedalled for a few kilometres, passing fences, cars, trees, fields, rocks, a mill, a hill, clouds, cats, kids, their parents, lots of gravel. i grovelled in distress when my bike wouldn’t climb uphill. i saw a ramshackle pontoon entering the sea. it was cold and nearly not cloudy, but the water was fluttering friendly with warmth and salt. i don’t get to say to myself ‘i love this life, it is good, i like everything, i am fine, thank you’ and get the waters’ kiss when my phone beeps of text message. i read it, my knees become softer than the sea could have been on my lips, whatta’ life, i think tomyself, this boy loveloves me, it couldn’t get better, this is probably the fulcrum of my human happiness, ever, ever, i’ll leave my bike here, not to slide so fast on the deep steep slope ‘acoming.

he had been travelling for a couple of months, and we had little communication, save for some long emails that (int)erupted from my side. from his then-spot, a portuguese peninsula, through distant short message service, he asked in what to me was an unusually retro-romantic formulation, if there wasn't a slight chance, if he waited there for a bit, watching the sun disappear behind a hill, that i could somehow materialise from back there, with auburn hair and a soft heart, made from striated tissue and myocardial cells.

i went back to copenhagen the next day. i hit the beach with s. and p. we had no work. we had no worries. we were some sort of centaurs with adolescent heads, beatnik necks and 20 something year old bodies. it was almost cold, truly windy, yet i radiated. i hadn’t dealt with the text message, left it unanswered so as to live in the fulcrum potential a little while longer. some restlessness settled in. the kind with red wood ants in the stomach and the legs. i called him. his phone was dead. my brain scanning at high speeds through all the collection of semi-retarded, unrealistic rom-coms i have ever seen, sent back some electrical impulse. i translated it. i bought a one-way ticket to lisbon. i was to fly in two days. love conquers all. i don't see and i don't hear anything. i don't even listen to my intuition. i’m set. i’m the fish crawling out of the sea growing legs on the way, i am puffed rice, i am the fat milk on top, i am the most beloved of earthlings. i have no way of seeing he’s so well anchored in the self-generated image of a serious but fun, wise, well read, different, special creator, kind and pure, that he’s got no idea how lost he really is. that he’s got no idea what prickly pear of an existential pickle he’s putting us in.

i didn't either. because the truth is, i believed unquestioningly like a true follower of my own disorganised ideology, nobody really wants to know the real you so just build a new one for survival, until of course you meet that one ideal-soul-mate- androgynous-half -severed-from-you-by-some-zeus. because he would, he will like you for you, accept this without giving it more thought, grandpa Disney and grandma rom-com will help you, television is your friend, don’t be a sucker with sweaty palms, grit your teeth, close your eyes and hope, wait for it, develop on this ideal, maybe make him be a little like your dead father whom you never really got to know as a human and don’t accept anything else, and when you meet him, don’t try to get to know him too well, just assign him these features you think you see in him and then take it from there. until that happens, just play the role, adapt, don’t be weird, be social, maybe he’s out there in the world pretending, too.

so there i went, out of the frying pan and into the fire. when i bought the plane ticket there was only me and this feeling i didn't know how to call other than love. autodidact, my ass. later, the thought that he might fall in love suddenly with some nearby creature with sand between her toes did creep in, but it was quickly replaced by calm at what i believed to be his intrinsic goodness, which of course excluded any acts of cruelty, also cued by feeling we had a true love and friendship pact, that of telling each other the whole truth, no matter what.

but the absolutely random moves of atoms in the universe made it so that a girl who smelled like soup and had a candy-wrapper voice to be in close geographic proximity to a boy who was ready to dilute his fears and loathings a bit, a boy who was ready to believe, albeit temporarily, a little bit more in the image he had been building of himself. a girl ready to stomp out his self-doubts about his creative powers. to va-li-date him.

yet another thing i hadn’t grasped at that time, the umpteenth, was that the gassy text message about the hill and my sudden apparition there had nothing to do with reality-seeking but it was a way to connect to someone who loved him and yearned for him, to feel less alone. to be able to, unwittingly maybe, approach soup-girl. or let himself be approached, like a crusty bread heel dipped in yesterday’s borscht.

i flew anyway, with unicorns and chestnuts in my stomach, with the feeling coming straight from pop classics that if the plane crashed (a recurring thought for my generation brought up for a few years during communism and then in a confusing mix of western baloney and local fears my mother lovingly passed on) it was ok, uplifting even (!!), because i’d be dying for love, i’d be up there riding that big wave, a new fulcrum. i’ve lived to perfection.

i got to lisbon early morning, it was a perfect warmth, the kind without clouds, the kind that i hadn’t met in a long while, as i was residing in the high standard of living north. i try calling him. phone still dead. i try to reach his friend. he picks up. says f. is not here. he’ll call you later. he calls me. i answer, rattling with joy, my cigarette ash falling on my red espadrilles,

he says, look, i came here to discover myself, to be alone, it’s not the time for us to meet.

i say ok, but what about your text message?

that was two days ago, now is now.

true, but here i am. let’s see each other!

it’s not possible, i want to be alone. alone, alone, lone, low, low, one, none, done, nothing.

that was the first big pink herring. i took it as a musical note, i danced to it on the streets, feeling some surreal happiness that i am experiencing such a great love, it seemed to be enough, it was all mine, this feeling was happening in me. he’s young, real young, he’s gotta do some stuff on his own, who am i to barge in over his hill?, i pretended to reason for survival.

kind of convalescent, i lodged at the place of a guy from couchsurfing, whom i found on the day of landing there, blind luck, nice guy, gone on vacation, his apartment near jardim de estrela, the garden of the star, there was something so soothing in that name. during the day i would walk the heat- and dust heavy streets of lisbon, in the evenings i would buy cigarettes and a bottle of white wine and i’d go back to the apartment’s sheltered and shaded terrace. i split the grounds with real tourists, the kind that pack socks and cameras, but leave their humanity at home: two french women in their thirties, two temperamental travelling teenage english girls and a german couple in their 20s, straighter and stiffer than a new ruler. it was crowded, but there was a lot of room inside me, i’d sleep on a bean bag in the 3 square meters hallway between the living room and the terrace, it was perfect, i had nothing to do with any of them and their territorial fights about who should get the master bedroom were amusing. that little hallway, a little too big and catholic of a metaphor.

i would compose rhymes to my sadness and i would stumble, here and there, on the stump of ‘i want you here, i don’t want you here’, justified only by him having met someone, but that seemed impossible as he would have said so when i asked him directly, which made the stump more stubborn and me more likely to stumble. i was “no one, or little more than an unintelligible cacophony, persisting in time and wearing out in space.” as Borges quoted Don Diego Villarroel.

(and he added: “I am angry, fearful, compassionate, joyous, sad, greedy, generous, enraged, meek, and all the good and bad emotions and all the praiseworthy and reprehensible actions that can be found in all men together or separately. I have tried out all the vices and all the virtues, and in a single day I feel inclined to weep and laugh, give and keep, repose and suffer, and I am always unaware of the cause and the momentum of these contrarieties. I have heard this alternative of contrary impulses called madness; if it be so, we are all mad to a greater or lesser degree for I have noticed this unforeseen and repeated alternation in everyone.”)

I’d go every day to the botanical garden and i’d read Borges’ Total Library under an acer palmatum. it was cool and breezy like in my parents’ bedroom, they had wooden venetians, they were always open, light interrupted by lines, i’d always hide in there from the heat, get under the cold kitsch green cover and read book titles upside down. i can only remember two of them: ‘How to build a television set’ and ‘Antimetaphysics’. thats exactly how i felt under that acer, safe and cool like in my parents’ bedroom, in the summer.

to add fantasy to my odyssey, portugal seemed to be a point of coincidence and incidence that year, as my good friend m. was also travelling around at that same time, and he had presented himself on the tip of land where f. was. he was welcomed, because he was big and kind and didn’t step on anyone’s hand, he had his lonesome sorrows that he chewed on better by himself, but among others. he accepted to meet me when they were leaving this forbidden peninsula, i didn't know anything, if they were together still or not. we met on a huge boulevard, avenida da liberdade, i was sitting on a bench in the shade looking at tourists coming out of high-end shops burdened by bags when he made his appearance with a giant backpack that had left a huge sweat mark in the shape of a rabbit with long ears on his shirt. i wanted to point it out so we could laugh at it, but i had more (de)pressing things on my mind, even though he cautioned me, right after hellos, that i should not ask him anything about f. the way that sounded, that’s how i was feeling. so i laughed a bit at my troubles, at my trip, at my impulsiveness, to make him more at ease, when you laugh at pain it sounds more french, le pain, it feeds the other carbohydrates and sugars that let him settle more at ease on the bench, next to you.

i get it, i lied, i just have one question. did he kiss anyone? i asked exactly like this, not out of bashfulness, but out of some weird, untimely, naïvety.

yes, he replied, as if i had asked him if itwas hot on the bus, and all the buildings in lisbon fell onto my head.

we spent about an hour more together, drinking beer, smoking, laughing at fate’s rotten deal. i don't really know if we laughed at fate’s rotten deal, i have actually no idea what we talked about nor what we could have talked about. when we said goodbye, him going to catch a train (with f. and the soup-girl, which was unbeknownst to me at that point), and me moving to a new temporary residence (at a portuguese friend, as i hadn't yet bought a return ticket), he left me crying, not knowing i thought of him as a big fat traitor. when i told it to him, much later, he didn’t get it.

on the way to this new home i listened to Halal from Mazzy Star on repeat, and i cried with dollops, but sound free, a river and a half. it was already dark out but i wasn't concerned walking down unknown alleys, the worst had already happened. i called s., she and our old high-school gang were also arriving soon to lisbon, for their almost grown-up planned vacation, with an airbnb rental in the city centre, but talking to her i had no more tears left, i had already cried them all, and i felt bad about it, as if i wasn't really suffering. she listened anyway and said all was going to be fine, we’ll see each other soon, maybe i wanted to wait till they came. i don't know why, but it made sense. in a way, the worst thing i could imagine had already happened, it had just happened, and it wasn't so bad. i was still breathing. and i wasn't sorry about it, either. i slept very well that night, in a big bed, close to the ceiling, so close that i had to climb a high ladder to it, in a small room, cant even remember where the window was. i just had some restlessness in my legs, as if all my pain was there, they couldn't be stretched out, nor gathered at my chin where my hands could grab them by their knees, but when i managed to fall asleep it was creme brûlée. the next day i told my portuguese friend all about how this boy surprise-hurt me, i didn't know her so well but she was the best companion i could have had on that day. she told me about her immature boyfriend that she had painfully broken up with and then took me with on a visit to a friend of hers, who lived in a crowded apartment, with a geriatric feeling to it, and while they were chatting and eating pastel de nata in the kitchen, i smoked in a dark green room, dark green curtains drawn, a room where a grandma is getting ready to die, with dark green plants and dark green paintings, dark green dust on all paraphernalia that was contracting the space.

when my friends arrived to lisbon, i got taken in like a nice little stray dog. i was out of money and out of meaning. on the day when they arrived the only shoes i had on my trip, a blood red pair of espadrilles, broke. i took it to heart. (i had to say this). so i guided them barefooted on the little streets i was already so familiar with and at some point b. & c. bought me a pair of red sandals. i felt the lowest of the low, the luckiest son of a gun in the whole world. maybe they did it more for their own shame than for my sake, but i loved them more shamelessly since, how they welcomed me to their vacation, with no shoes and a scraped soul. i don't believe in soul but it is a good word when you need to name something you cannot really explain and you know like this it would get across, somehow. and when i wrote about “real tourists, the kind that pack socks and cameras, but leave their humanity at home”, i also really wanted to use soul instead of humanity,

but i didn’t.