This is a (Long-Distance) Love Story

Homeward bound.

I am in love with somewhere else.

This is what I would shamefacedly tell my home country if such communication were possible. I would smart at the inevitable cruelness of her reply, yet she would have every right to be cruel, for in loving Cambridge I am unfaithful. I pace down cobbled streets that are not her own, and I lie on greens that she will never recognise. I am drinking milder and milkier coffee, not outside in the sun, but in the amber indoor light. If I insisted on keeping her in my life, she would laugh in harsh disbelief. But I want her there, need her there, and though I can’t deny our relationship has changed, my affection for my home country has not faded. When I am at university, we are far away from each other, and our love story has shifted into a long-distance one.

I have taken a plane to see her, and I sit, now, in a café in Lisbon. A half-drunk bica is lingering somewhere by my wrist, and a football match is crackling on an outdated TV. Outside, horns blare, and people weave around each other down the narrow pavements. The sun is bright, too bright, and I’m squinting at the screen of my laptop. But I type anyway, because the combination of a missed bus and a bad hangover has made me somewhat emotional. Writing has become my last-ditch attempt to subdue the nerves that coil at the pit of my stomach.

These are the first moments of our reunion, and things are awkward. There is tension, and my country and I do not know how to act around each other. We avoid each other’s gaze. There is a distance between myself and the peeling white walls. The cobblestones feel uncomfortably disjointed beneath my feet. I feel as if I reached out to touch one of the fig trees, it would shrink away from me. I do not slip back into the country as I had thought I would, but rather, hover unnaturally above its surface. I become self-conscious, convinced that evidence of another love lingers in my hair, that it lines my clothes and skin. 

When I speak Portuguese, I am tentative, apprehension coats every pause. The language does not spill fluidly from my lips, as I had expected. No, it spurts out in an irregular, misshapen form. I speak over myself, and words jostle in the air. I am understood, but my betrayal has revealed itself. I flush as I pay for the bill, and slink out. It’s not the same between us, I think. Something’s changed.

But then, of course it has. We are no longer in each other’s company every day. Things are harder now. Relationships take work, that’s what people always say.  And so I try and deter from rash judgements, and little by little, we come back to each other. Hesitantly, the sounds trickle towards me. I lift my face to the sky, and the sun ebbs across my skin. I befriend an old woman who has asked me for help with her bus ticket, and I am rewarded with a flurry of Portuguese words, a crooked smile, and a point in the direction of a pastelaria where she really thinks I ought to buy some food for the trip. Suddenly, my country and I are not far away from each other at all. The awkwardness has been dispelled. The sounds of passing people no longer wash over my ears, but they are inside me, they thrum in my chest.

I know that we have slotted back together, and I stick to her like a silhouette. I am joyful, now, brimming with enthusiasm when I speak, and I end up forming the words in my mouth too quickly, too eagerly. Once again, I give myself away- I have ignored the nonchalance that goes hand in hand with the language- but this time, I ignore the knowing glances. I remind myself to slow down my pace as well as my words, and fall back into the amble that suits these narrow streets. I feel heavy and stupid in my layers. I change into something light, simple, no fuss. I no longer feel hot and flustered. Things are just like they used to be, I cry inwardly, things are just like I remembered.

My elation dims at the thought of leaving her. How will we manage, I find myself silently thinking, as I walk arm in arm with the blue sky. In Cambridge, a place of long words and antiquity, I feel a long way from her, from home. Home: Where old men line the pavement, discussing in uneasy tones what the world is coming to. Where washing lines are slung from rooftops, across windows. I never see little old men discussing the doomed fate of the world in Cambridge, I think sadly. I will miss the washing lines.

And the seemingly never ending, pounding pace of Cambridge makes it all the more daunting. Life seems to be sped up when I’m over there, or perhaps, it is slowed down when I’m over here. When I go back to university, I remember that life is made up of plans, deadlines, a new thing, problem, excitement, cropping up by the hour. I do not know how to love this electric place without falling out of love with my home. I do not know how to make the two places mine to equal measure. I worry they will not be able to co-exist peacefully inside of me. I am convinced the Portuguese sun will be too blinding, the Cambridge winds too icy.  

I turn to language.  A word exists in Portuguese, one that is hard to translate: Saudade, a feeling of deep yearning and melancholy, associated with something, or someone, you love. I realise that I can be in one place, loving it, whilst yearning for another. I realise that this does not lessen my love for either. I come to the conclusion, in a flash, that all the best love stories I’ve read have been drawn out, complex. How romantic, I think, with a sudden excitement. How agonising. It is just like a Portuguese telenovela.

I finish this now in a small room lined with books, the lamplight dim, and the sky darkening outside. It is a far cry from my white and blue home. But I acknowledge this, now, with ease, and send her beijinhos (little kisses) across the Atlantic, without feeling the need to pick one place over another.

All images belong to Clementine Lussiana, unless otherwise stated.