El Camino: Part 2

The last 24hrs have been a whirlwind of airports, passersby and shitty food. And too much coffee. My stomach is very upset with me.

Once I arrived in Lisbon at 530am, pitch dark in these early ‘winter’ months, I hailed a cab from a diminutive, gnarled cabby who did not utter a word of understanding when I showed him the address of my hotel—just a simple turning towards his steering wheel and heading off into the creeping dawn.

I arrived at my hotel 6 hours before I would be able to get in. The city of Lisbon was just waking up with me as I try to enter its interior domains. Cafes with locals signaled the few signs of life in the damp morning air of the subtropical city, the halogen lights sprouting their yellow-white auras onto the moist streets like clouds of fungal spores.

I took an Uber down to the shorefront of the old city, Barrio Alto, and ventured out into the day now spreading on this part of the world. I stood between two worlds as I exited the car, the vast plaza on my right denoting the past, now decrepit, empire that hewn the gorgeous and magisterial buildings. And to my left, the sea that was the source of this empire and the city sprawling up on the hills adjacent to it.

My ruck is digging into my shoulders, compressing the gelatinous discs in my spine micrometer by micrometer every second. Exhaustion, from being in my third drastically different time zone within a week, permeates my brain. I meander this way and that, hoping to find some place of rest but fairly certain there will be none for the intervening time until I can check into my hotel.

According to Apple Maps, there was a ‘beach’ right across from the Pres de l’eau, and so I directed the Uber there in hopes that I would be able to refresh myself in the cold ocean water and lounge on the sand with the morning rays.

Alas, the ‘beach’ is only so in the most abstract sense of the word – it is a narrow spit of land ensconced in concrete with sand that is entirely soaked from the high tide washing in and out approximately every 15 seconds. No where to swim or keep my stuff.

Disappointed, and exhausted still, I trudge on into the city. I walk along the Avenida da Riebeira das Naus, the main avenue abutting the harbor, sharing the dewed sidewalk with the numerous early morning runners. Travelers too, giving themselves away with the rucks they carry like my own.

I follow a runner navigating the streets as a local would, avoiding not so obvious traffic jams and unpleasant terrain to run on, to a portion of the Avenida where a café has several unoccupied tables and a view of the Ponte 25 de Abril with warm pastel homes perched on the hills above it to the right.

There is only one other patron hunched over a newspaper or her phone sipping espresso. I order inside in the humble, beginner Portuguese I picked up on the flight's informatic language course I watched instead of sleeping, fortified by my patience in learning French and Polish and eventually just pointing at what I wanted to the sleepy but kind worker.

Sitting outside in the grey dawn, now armed with a fresh orange juice (which I quickly chug), a cappuccino and pasteis de nata (a little pastry with a creamy, pudding center and a caramelized top famous in Lisbon), I rack my brain on what to do for the intervening 6 hours.

The only thing I can come up with is to try and find an ‘Arabic Bath’ which were quite ubiquitous in Spain when I lived there, especially in the south. I can rent a locker and pay the fee, spending some relaxing hours dozing in the pools of various temperatures until my hotel becomes available. The assumption that the Iberian peninsula has Arabic baths across its whole is in fact totally wrong, however. I discover that Hammams, Turkish baths, are in fact the common mode of relaxation in Lisbon, but many of them don’t open until 10am anyway. 2 hours plus in the future. No dice.

Having finished my breakfast (hearty toast with salmon and scrambled eggs) and mildly energized, I simply start walking into the city, condemned by a lack of forethought and poor timing to meander about. Not a bad outcome, all things considered, but nevertheless, not an ideal way to spend the first few hours of my grand sojourn.

I walk the city for hours, probably 5 miles or so, my main pit stops being various parks. The views are beautiful and it is always a wonderful thing to drift through a living, breathing city with people bustling to work, old folks hobbling to complete their early morning errands and flocks of school children being shepherded off to learn.

My exhaustion actually dissipates for a while, buoyed by the sustenance, the novelty of a foreign city and the myriad objects of contemplation flitting through my consciousness.

Love, work and the future query themselves to my mind at varying instances as I walk through a working class neighborhood or climb the formidable steps that transition between the city's several hills. The year behind me churns and spins through my psyche like clothes in a spin cycle.

Most notably it seems to me then, beyond the impinging desires for sleep in a quiet and comfortable setting, my heart is stirred by one of two inflight movies I watched (instead of sleeping). Taking into consideration my penchant for becoming almost unbearably wistful and overly romantic when traveling, doubly so when I’m very tired, I found the movie “Next Goal Wins” to not only be hilarious but also deeply moving.

Directed Taika Waititi, in short, it tells the true(ish) story of a washed up and rageful soccer coach who’s relegated to leading the worst soccer team in the world at the time - American Samoa.

While there are many things I’d like to praise about the film, like the wholesome treatment of transgenderism and the masterful navigation of legacy colonial and anti-colonial themes through humor, the heart of the story is centered around the coach.

This is what hit home for me and had tears streaming down my cheeks at 3am while staring at icy stars 34,000 feet over the Atlantic.

You see, the boozing, biting coach is struggling deeply with grief. Spoiler alert; he’s going through a divorce and he’s grieving. Very big spoiler alert; he’s grieving the loss of his teenage daughter who died in a car crash tragically three years before.

He still hasn’t come to accept it. He’s angry at the world and most of all he’s angry at himself. He blames himself for not protecting her. And he hasn’t forgiven himself. He’s deeply unhappy. This poisons all his relationships and the anger seeps out into every aspect of his life.

The impossibly positive American Samoans are the salve that help heal his heart, through welcoming them into their family and calling him out for his need to grieve. In turn, the coach brings a professionalism and leadership that the team hasn’t experienced before.

Together they turn things around, insofar as American Samoa hasn’t been the worst ranked team since then, and they’ve actually won 3 games since the time the movie took place in 2011.

I connected to this story deeply. As I’ve written about my dating life, I have a lot of things I regret in my past. I seem to struggle especially when recognizing that if I hadn’t spent so much of my energy on promiscuity I could have spent it honing my career and/or helping others.

Especially in light of what I experienced this past year on my deployment, I know that a greater commitment to my military career would have put me in a stronger position to effect meaningful change I wish to see in the world.

But most of all, I’ve been recognizing that carrying around my past has made it extremely hard for me to love someone and allow someone to love me.

You see, I met a beautiful, elegant, tender Polish woman on my deployment. We’re the same age, have both had adventurous, riotous younger 20s and are now trying to settle down moving forward.

We dated for four months and although it was a brief time, we got to know each other pretty well. She’s the first person I’ve said ‘I love you’ to romantically since my last serious girlfriend when I was 17.

She loves me. And I love her. But I broke it off between us the week before I left Poland. We haven’t spoken since.

I was hoping that the tears on the flight the night before were mainly a product of exhaustion and hunger. Yet as I write those last few paragraphs my eyes water and a choking weight seems to enclose my throat.

I was so desperate to call her three or four times yesterday as I dreamily wandered around the city. I had an insight on the flight, as I cried and was inspired by the movie, that I still hadn’t forgiven myself for the times that I violated my own values. That anger makes me afraid of who I could be in the future. Thus it feels really dangerous to allow someone to love me, and in turn love someone else. Because I’m afraid of who I could be now that I know I have that capacity.

I wanted to call her and tell her that’s why I’m scared to let her get too close. That’s why I’m going on the El Camino, to find forgiveness for myself and if she can be patient then we can move forward again.

But I made myself wait and get a full night's sleep, because we haven’t talked in a month. I can’t play games with her emotions going off half-cocked because I’m delirious from lack of sleep.

Yet those feelings remain.

This is a dominant theme of my roadblock to finding love.

And what’s more, given my extensive research in romantic psychology and experience in dating, I am deeply concerned about the type of relationship we would have.

She also comes from a family where her creativity and individuality were neglected and mishandled by middle-class parents. Her mother was also strict, religious and irrational like mine. We have a lot of similar baggage, which although can lead to unique understanding, concerns me that the love may feel so strong simply because it feels so familiar. Everything I’ve seen and studied leads me to believe that this, although very commonplace, is not a good place to build from for a long-term relationship.

This too is what I will contemplate along the Camino.

So now you can see a few more of my reasons for taking a long walk. I need to sort out how I handle love. In a big way. And it’s going to take time.

This is something I also came to realize last night after the movie. While I realized I need to forgive myself, which brought great relief and solace in the form of tears, I also promised myself that I would give myself whatever time necessary to find my own peace.

This is a critical aspect of my life I'm only beginning to understand.

I cannot deny any longer that I feel deeply ambivalent about love and about myself. Even if I can recognize the fact that I feel this way, it does not immediately ameliorate.

I need to take the time to find my own peace from my own answers, and though it may be deeply frustrating to have something I’ve yearned for, for so long at my fingertips - going forward at odds with myself will only lead to greater conflict and negativity in the future.

I need to give myself the time. Which, in reality, is loving and tending to myself in a more profound way than I ever have before. And if I learn how to do this successfully, then I will be able to do the same in the future for all those in my life around me. And in turn know how to receive that same profound degree of love.

But I must learn, because unfortunately I didn’t learn how growing up. And that is ok. It is ok because it is my life. It's where I’m at. And I’m moving forward.

Thank you for reading and my very best to you. Much love.