Sunday from the Porch
I Booked a Flight
I booked a flight to Porto last week. A month in Portugal, starting July 1st. I’ve been sitting with the announcement for a few days now, unsure what to do with it. Which is usually how I know there’s something worth writing.
The booking itself was easy. The permission to want it took longer.
I came to Austin in December. February, really, in any meaningful sense. My body arrived immediately but the rest of me caught up some six weeks later, when I stopped waiting to feel like a visitor and started feeling like someone who lived somewhere. That had not happened in a while. I had spent the better part of two years moving: Ireland, Italy, Germany, Australia, places in between. And while I loved the motion, it had also meant I was in a perpetual daydream between the life I was building and the life I was testing. Austin was the first place that didn’t ask me to perform either of those things.
I surrendered. That’s the right word. I stopped pushing for the next thing and let the city have me for a while. By March I was making quiet promises to myself: No overcommitting, no overanalyzing, no forcing the next move before this one had finished speaking.
There’s something genuinely different here. I come from Philadelphia, which I will always love the way you love a difficult family member. With full awareness of why you needed to leave. Austin is not that. The people here are, broadly, happier in the day-to-day way. The way someone at the coffee shop talks to you, or a stranger on a trail does a little more than give a nod. I’ve felt more alive in my regular hours here than I did in years of trying to engineer the right life back home. That started to matter.
And then the fear crept in. The quiet kind that sounds like: what if the impulse to leave has gone quiet? For two years that impulse had been my most reliable compass. It told me when to move, where to go, what I was made of. Standing in a city where I finally felt at ease, I couldn’t hear it the same way. I didn’t know if that meant I had arrived somewhere or if I had simply gotten comfortable. Which are two different things and not always easy to tell apart from the inside.
I joked with an Uber driver a few weeks back. I said, “I tell the Universe, don’t let me meet nobody. Don’t let me fall in love.” She let out roaring knowing laughter, enough to say there was more truth in it than either of us would have to admit out loud.
A lot of people in this country never leave. The cost of travel is real and prohibitive in ways that don’t get discussed enough. I’ve been lucky and deliberate in equal measure, but I also know how easy it is to build a life that quietly makes leaving harder: commitments, routines, relationships that calcify into reasons. The fact that I finally felt stable was the thing I was most grateful for and, at the same time, the thing I trusted least. Safety had been unfamiliar for so long. I wasn’t sure what to do with it.
Porto was not a complicated decision once I stopped resisting the idea of going anywhere. Lisbon came to mind first, but I tend to do better in secondary cities. My month in Turin taught me that a few years ago. When someone passed it along the same way someone here passed along Porto. It turned out to be one of the better decisions I’d made. I like the pace a smaller city offers. The way it makes connection more likely and memory more specific. There’s coast nearby, proximity to other hubs for weekends when I need to move. It felt right the way things sometimes feel right before you can fully explain them.
Then there was the other thing.
I’ve been spending time with someone recently who is, in the clearest terms I have, a lot. In the best possible way. He is, somehow, a combination of everything I have ever wanted in a person. Every version of someone I’ve been drawn to, assembled into one person who is also, genuinely (like, genuinely), drawn to me. That felt like confirmation. Like evidence that the patience had been pointing somewhere real.
But. His lease is up in November and he doesn’t want to stay in Austin beyond that. I sat with it and have acknowledged and accepted I have unfinished business here. I want this to be the place I return to with a sense of permanence. I’m not ready to leave this city. Not for another city. Not for any reason I can currently articulate clearly enough to act on. And telling him I’d stay if he stayed wasn’t something I could offer honestly. It wouldn’t have been fair to him. It wouldn’t have been fair to me.
So I booked the flight.
Not as escape. Not as answer. As practice and a reminder that the life I’m building was always supposed to include this. The motion. The independence. The willingness to keep moving toward what I need rather than what is simply in front of me.
What I keep returning to is the truth that love will not ask you to make yourself smaller. That has been true every time I’ve felt it. Romantic love. Self-love. The love that comes through place and belonging. Real love opens the door. It says go. It says you shouldn’t have to choose. It says: if this is meant to be, it will exceed expecations and survive your expansion and mine.
I believe that. I’m trusting it.
Porto in July. And whatever comes after, after that.