Sunday from the Porch
The Art of Leaving
People always want to know what nomadic living is like but the answer is usually less glamorous than they expect. Before I leave a city, “I cook.”
By then, the apartment starts to change shape all by itself. The rhythms loosen. The piles begin. Chargers are gathered from outlets. Laundry gets folded directly into organized stacks instead of casually tossed over a chair. Open tabs become bookmarked lists. I check flight times and weather forecasts more often than necessary.
But first, usually two days before departure, I cook. I make whatever is left in the house. Eggs become breakfast burritos. Vegetables get roasted before they spoil. Rice gets stretched into lunches. If there’s enough left over, I make myself something for the airport. If not, almonds and protein bars usually do the trick. Nomadic living, at least the sustainable kind, is less about spontaneity than systems. Leaving well is a skill. And over the years, I’ve gotten very good at it.
The day after cooking comes packing: I store almost everything I own in plastic bins spread across a handful of places now: Philadelphia, Ireland, Austin. Clothes. Linens. Kitchenware. Cables. Cold-weather gear. Books I’m not ready to part with but not ready to carry either. Everything labeled. Everything organized. Everything designed to make movement easier the next time around.
In Ireland and Philadelphia, I even keep what I jokingly call “go bags”: a few preferred outfits, toiletries, chargers, enough familiarity to soften the landing if I need to keep moving after I arrive. I like knowing that I can land tired, grab the bag, and go—in all of my familiar places.
People imagine this lifestyle as perpetual motion. In reality, it’s infrastructure.
What most people are really asking when they ask about nomadic living is whether it feels lonely. Whether it feels untethered. Whether, eventually, you start wanting a place to stay.
The truth is more complicated than that.
The older I get, the less interested I am in escape. I’m not searching for a fantasy version of life anymore. I’m trying to build one that feels expansive enough to hold multiple versions of home at once.
That was part of the reason I came to Austin in the first place.
I wanted to prove something to myself: that travel could remain integrated into my life rather than becoming something I only spoke about nostalgically. As soon as the first person warned me of it, I knew I wanted to make good use of the harsh Texas summers as a reason to leave and get back to Europe. I knew I had things to tend to in Ireland. But I also knew I didn’t necessarily need another three uninterrupted months in the same city just because conventional adulthood says that’s what stability looks like.
At first, I thought Lisbon or Barcelona. Then I remembered how much I tend to love secondary cities. Cork, Turin, Frankfurt, and Melbourne all changed me in undeniable ways. And, you’ll notice, these are all cities with a little grit left in them. Places that still feel lived-in. Porto and Madrid suddenly became the frontrunners for July and August, and eventually Porto won.
Porto seemed to offer much of what I loved about Lisbon, but with a slightly different energy. Slower in certain ways. Rougher around the edges in others. A little more grounded. A little less polished. The kind of city where I suspect you can still become a regular somewhere if you stay long enough.
I already have places bookmarked. Cult of Pita. Muu Steakhouse. Mercado Porto Belo. Urban Market. Early for a slow weekend morning. Wish You Were Here for the kinds of nights that usually begin with “just one drink” and somehow become something larger than that.
Before Porto, though, there are other stops: New Orleans for Switchback, the outdoor industry gathering that increasingly feels like a family reunion disguised as a trade show. Then Philadelphia for ten days to celebrate my brothers graduating high school and to spend time with family before crossing the Atlantic again. I leave Philadelphia late on June 30th and land in Portugal the morning of July 1st.
Lately, life has felt full of transitions like that. Endings blending quietly into beginnings before you’ve fully processed either one. There’s grief in this departure that I didn’t fully anticipate. But not because Austin failed me.
Somewhere over these past months, between familiar coffee shops, slow mornings, long walks, conversations that stretched unexpectedly late into the night, and the steady rhythm of building a life here, Austin stopped feeling temporary.
There are departures where you are relieved to leave. This isn’t one of them. There’s unfinished business here. Friendships I want to keep deepening. Corners of the city I still haven’t explored. Work that feels increasingly rooted. For the first time in a long time, I built routines here that I didn’t feel the need to escape from.
And somewhere inside all of that, there was also connection. The kind that arrives slowly enough that you almost miss it while it’s happening. The kind that makes departure feel heavier than expected when the time finally comes to go. Some doors close quietly. Without conflict. Without spectacle. Just two people standing honestly at different edges of timing and readiness. That carries its own kind of grief.
The strange thing about building a life across multiple places is that eventually all of them start to feel like home. Which means every departure contains a little loss now. Every airport becomes a temporary negotiation between excitement and sadness. Between movement and rootedness. Between who you were in one place and who you may become in the next. And who you’ll be when you’re back.
Seasons change. People move. Relationships evolve. Cities enter and exit our lives at different moments for different reasons. The goal was never to outrun attachment. It was to stay open enough to experience it fully while understanding that movement is still part of who I am.
So, I’ve stacked the bins in a friend’s attic and I’m zipping up my trusted 70L Cotopaxi Allpa Duffel. I’ll take one last look around the apartment before turning the lights off and locking the door behind me.
And then I’ll go. Not because I’m running away. Because I promised myself I would keep going. And because, for the first time in a very long time, I finally have a life worth returning to when I come back.