One year in Lisbon

Peaches are in season again.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Peaches are in season again. Barbecues line the narrow streets of Madragoa, Graça, Alfama, Bairro Alto. Sardines are packed like, well, sardines on the grill, their metallic-rainbow skin glistening at golden hour, sparks leaping off the hot charcoal like fireflies after dark. A colour-coded spreadsheet makes its way around the expat network, detailing where to get your fix throughout June. The limestone pavements are carpeted with jacaranda petals, purple against mole-coloured calçadas. Spring is knocking at the door of summer. By this point, we’ve all lost count of how many heatwaves we’ve had this year. And exactly one year ago today, I arrived here for the holiday that became a migration.

When I decided to move, I was drunk on chilled red wine and hot summer romance and sunshine on bare skin and the never-old sensation of running a fork, gently, over one side of a sardine, skimming flesh from its spine, the pungent taste and smell I never stop craving, all year round.

Peaches go out of season at the end of September. Sardines follow in the early weeks of October. Mid-October, I celebrated my birthday here. I nested in my flat throughout November, when it rained so much that you could barely traverse Lisbon’s famous pavements without slipping over. I spent my first Christmas away from my family, then navigated my first central-heating-less February. All the while I got to spend hours outside every day, at neighbourhood quiosques in leafy spots or in Estrela Park or walking along the Tagus River, feeling like this life was still quite good, actually.

And then spring came back around, with its promise of that first summer, and it was as if I’d passed some sort of test. I have experienced all four seasons in Lisbon, the way I sometimes theorise that one should do with a prospective life partner before making any milestone decisions.

I have been mostly happy here, in a way that feels safe to me: less ‘weekend warrior’, more weeks on end of gentle daily joys. My life has a comforting rhythm to it: good friends and a brightly-coloured workspace and communal lunches and yoga and rituals like my podcast club or writing groups. I am living my best life, and by that I mean the life that works best for me, not someone else.

I have begun to seek more adventure, such is the human condition. I recently had a refresher driving lesson to acquaint myself with driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road (a skill I never picked up, delegating to ex-boyfriends whenever abroad). Every so often, I’ll say something like, ‘I need to get out of Lisbon’, in the way that the cast members of Made in Chelsea used to declare they needed a break from London. Then I’ll return after a lost weekend in Manchester or Faro, and fall back in love with Lisbon all over again.

Although I’ve moved to another country, I’m still the same person I was in London. Sometimes anxiety robs me of my capacity to be in the present, the way it can to anyone, anywhere. And sometimes I get disappointed about things not working out. Being here doesn’t immunise me from ambition or occasional loneliness (although, I’ll testify, the blue skies help).

Still I return, sooner rather than later, to the reality that I uprooted my life to move here. And I need to make that count. I made a high-stakes decision, and it injected energy back into my thirties in a way that propelled me to behave like the heroine of my own life, not the victim of it.

Was moving here the right choice? The past year has been one of the happiest of my life, yes, but a honeymoon period isn’t enough to validate such a big decision. Moving here was the right choice because I am still choosing to make it the right choice. Not every day, but most days I manage it.

I just finished the second season of the Netflix series, Four Seasons. In the final episode (spoiler alert), a prominent character decides on a whim to move to a little mountain town in the Italian Alps, after visiting friends there. The past five years had happened to her: empty-nesting, divorce, bereavement. But now she was making a choice to move forward, because life tossed her a lemon and she said perché no? After a period of inertia, she wanted to do something with her life, rather than leaving that section of the canvas blank.

She didn’t pick her new home from a TikTok shortlist. This sleepy village in the Italian Alps was just the opportunity that presented itself, at the right time and place. And it was her duty to make that opportunity count.

That’s sort of how I feel about Lisbon. God knows, there is so much I love about it here: the husky-voiced Portuguese grandmothers, as animated and opinionated as my late Jewish grandmother; the saturated blue skies; the tiles and pavements; the streets of apartment buildings that collectively resemble a Dulux colour chart; the calming slowness... believe me when I say I could keep these semi-colons coming to me. Is there another version of me, perhaps, who could be living in Bordeaux or Mexico City, had things worked out differently? Perhaps. It doesn’t matter. I was gifted two idyllic weeks last June; the fortnight that propelled me to say, porque não? To finally make the move.

But it isn’t the role of the city I’m in to hand me the life I want. That’s my job. Nor am I in a position to scapegoat it for anything I lack. I migrated here; it owes me nothing. It’s helpful to remember that conditionality. It’s a good way to live.

Peaches are in season again. And as I bite into mine, the memories of that first summer surfacing, it reminds me to savour this moment once again.