The Disassembly

The house sold. I'm leaving for Portugal in July. I'm taking almost nothing with me. The computer, the camera and the dog.

I have a pit in my stomach that hasn't gone away in weeks. It's there when I wake up and when I go to bed. It doesn't get better as I get closer to leaving. If anything, it gets worse, because every thing I give away and every utility I shut off is one more piece of the life I'm leaving behind.

Portugal isn't the hard part. I've planned for Portugal. I've researched it, signed a lease, learned tiny bits of the language. The hard part is having to rebuild a life from nothing once I get there. New routines. New people. New rhythms. A version of myself I haven't met yet.

I'm not a joiner. Friendships don't come easy to me. The ones I have here are decades old, full of shared memories that no one else will understand or care about. I worry I'm going to lean on those memories instead of building new ones. That I'll spend my time looking behind me instead of ahead.

There are no handholds and there's no net. I'm jumping off a cliff and hoping for a soft landing, but I don't even have the visa yet. The interview is done. Now I'm waiting on Portugal to approve me. Until they do, none of this is guaranteed.

The house closes before I leave, so there's a stretch of time, a couple of months, when I'll have nowhere to be. A friend invited me to stay at the Oregon coast. Newt and I will be there until it's time to fly.

I worry about Newt. He doesn't know any of this is coming. He's going to lose one of his best friends, the dog whisperer who takes him on field trips three times a week. And the flight… I have no idea how he's going to handle it. He's going to wake up in a strange country where everything smells different and nothing is familiar. He's going to be disoriented, and there's no way to explain it to him.

I keep waiting for it to feel real. It doesn't, quite. The house is half-empty already, and the rooms echo. It already sounds like somewhere I used to live. The apartment in Viana is there, also empty, waiting for me. Newt is asleep on a sofa that's not coming with us.

The strangest part is right now. Not the leaving and not the arriving. The middle. When the old life is being disassembled and the new one isn't built yet. When the version of myself I'm about to meet is still a stranger.