An Ode to Friendship and Tacos🌮
I’d been having a particularly rough couple of days.
Not for any particular reason other than that I was going through another transition.
Mentally, I was already somewhere else, starting my next chapter. I am content and happy, loving life. Work is going well, and money is flowing.
But physically, I am still here in Portugal wrapping up my last 9 years in Europe and taking care of a particularly insecure dog—one who barks aggressively at 99% of the dogs we pass on the streets. Luckily, he is an angel with people and cuddly at home; otherwise, I’d have already hightailed it out of here.
Letting the Right Ones In
A few days ago, an old college friend of mine passed through for a night, along with her husband and almost three-year-old, in a camper van. They were on holiday, touring around Portugal and Spain for a few weeks, and made a detour to visit me.
Though I was happy to have company, right before they were to arrive, I started to get apprehensive. When you spend so much time alone, following the flow of your whims, the thought of having to be social again can sometimes feel more nerve-wracking than exciting. Plus, I was full-on menstrual, which made me want to crawl into a hole and hide away from the world even more than normal.
When they pulled up, and I saw my friend waving gleefully through the camper van, my anxieties immediately vanished.
We only spent less than 24 hours together in total, but we had so much fun.
I made tacos as an ode to Tucson, where we are both from. When you are from Tucson and have lived abroad for nearly a decade, eating tacos together becomes sort of a religious holiday understood by only a select few.
Then I took them on an accidentally long walk (a walk that would typically take me half an hour on my own). Little did I realize that having a toddler in tow makes everything take longer—much, much longer.
When we arrived at our destination, a Portuguese churro stand by the waterfront, my friend ordered us a powdered sugar feast.
We laughed as her son, who had barely touched his tacos, devoured his churro horizontally like corn on the cob.
My friend, her son, and I then climbed into a lounge chair fit for a giant, a cheesy photo op for tourists like us. Her son’s leg slipped into the crack of the chair, and he began crying. Her husband was holding the barking dog and simultaneously trying to take our picture. My friend was consoling her son, and I couldn’t help but grin at the chaotic absurdity of it all. It felt like home.
As I lay down to sleep that evening, I drifted easily into slumber. I didn’t need my usual meditation playing in the background, nor did I need my ears stuffed with earplugs or noise-canceling headphones. My friends were soundly sleeping in the caravan parked outside the courtyard; their proximity must have helped put me at ease.
The next day, we ate breakfast together and made another pilgrimage, this time to the lighthouse.
After lunch, we sauntered back to my place, and they packed up the van to head out. As her husband carefully maneuvered out of the courtyard, I yelled, “I love you guys!”
And then there was emptiness.
I am definitely not short on wonderful people to talk to, folks in different time zones to whom I can send life updates regardless of the time of day. I have a male bestie who I can talk about surfing with. I have a Taco Bell fan group with two college friends to who I can send Taco Bell-related memes. I have a few female besties with whom I can send long audios featuring mundane life updates on my long walks. And I have a loving mom who is always happy to hear from me despite the time difference. What I am saying is that I have a lot of loves in my life, y’all.
The problem, I’m finding, is that I rarely have people in the flesh with whom I can vibe. I suppose that is one trade-off to this nomadic lifestyle: my heart is broken up into little pieces and scattered around the globe forever more.
But There’s Always a Silver Lining
I love my people, the ones who make saying goodbye difficult, true. I have prioritized nurturing these relationships over the years because I know I am only as good as the company I keep. Even though that means I am always missing someone, I simultaneously always have someone to look forward to squeezing, someone who polishes a part of me that has been dimmed — and who likely knew me at my cringiest but still loves me anyway.
When I look back on my life, I can honestly say that I am most proud of the relationships I have cultivated. To me, this is the definition of success. So when the loneliness bug starts to creep in, I think about all the hugs (and hopefully tacos) I will get at my next destination.