The Assembly

We fly two weeks from today.

I wrote earlier about taking my life apart. This is about the part I haven't figured out yet: how to build a new one.

But before I can write about the building, I have to be honest about the leaving. The version I want to be true is that I'm retired, I'm free to live anywhere, and I'm choosing a small city on the Portuguese coast because I want a quieter life, good light, and time to make photographs.

The truer version is that I'm running away. I'm angry at what this country has become, and I don't see it getting better. At some point I stopped asking how to fix it and started plotting how to get away from it. That's not brave and it's not noble. It's where I landed. My best option, as far as I can tell, is to turn my back on it.

I don't know if that's even possible. The rage is still just a click away, even from 5,000 miles. If I land in Portugal and spend my mornings reading the same news and feeling the same fury, then I haven't moved at all.

Which is why the building matters. This move is an escape. Fine. The question is whether what I build over there is an actual life or just a hiding place. It has to be good enough, full enough, that I can let go of the anger. That's the test.

Some of the reconstruction is trivial. The apartment is nearly empty, so I need everything: a bed, a washing machine, internet. Newt needs a vet. It's a list, and I'm good at those. The list doesn't scare me. What scares me is what's left after the list is done.

Because the part that isn't a list is people.

I'm 63. The friendships I have here took decades to build, and they run deep. The few friends I have know me because they've been around for all of it. I can't take them with me. We'll stay in touch, but that's not the same thing as being there. The life I'm going to build needs people in it, and I'm starting from zero.

Or maybe it doesn't. That's the other possibility, and I think about it a lot. Maybe this part of life is quieter. Maybe it's just me and Newt, getting to know our new town, taking photographs, learning the place slowly. Not lonely. Alone. I've spent a lot of my life alone with a camera and I've never minded it. Maybe that's enough. I honestly don't know. I also don't know how that helps me set aside the anger.

I don't get to decide in advance. The friendships I have now weren't planned. They happened because I kept showing up in the same place for thirty years. Now I'm going to show up somewhere new, and we'll find out whether I'm building something or just hiding.

Two weeks.