Done.
I road a bicycle from Paris to Porto. 🚴🏿♀️
1967 km. 41 days. 3 countries. One restless, unemployed American on her fifty-lem trip to rock bottom…but this time, on a bicycle.
I’ve tried to start this newsletter so many different times and so many different ways, blitzing past the blindside of emotions I want to avoid but are somehow still dominating my present moment. Only for me to start at a sentence, false and full of the affectations I think make arriving at your destination complete, just to have the words knocked right off the page.
I arrived in Porto around 7am. I thought there wouldn’t be any traffic and I could just roll up to Livraria Lello without interruption, but there were so many vehicles already on the road. Tourists, commuters, delivery drivers, construction workers on their way to their respective área de obras around Porto. I didn’t plan this but I was arriving just before a number of festivals and celebrations including São João, a drone show that lit up the Matosinhos skyline (which made the Guinness Book of World Records with 3,100 drones flying in-sync), and the famous Lello bookstore’s first ever book festival that featured the likes of Olga Tokarczuk, Salman Rushdie, and Margaret Atwood. I was so unaware of everything that was happening in and around Porto that a small part of me could have mistaken all of this fanfare for some sort of surprise welcome back party, but I dismissed the delusion and just tried to get the photos I needed to bring this trip to a very necessary end.
But I wish I did. I wish even a small part of me could have borrowed some of the joy, a sense of purpose, from all of the festivities around me and truly feel a sense of pride in what I’d just accomplished. Obviously, I know cycling for 2 months through 3 countries isn’t a small thing, but as I rolled through the cobbled streets that I’ve known so well for the past 5 years, I was overwhelmed with the fact that I’d nothing to come back to. I had no job, home, family, or any tangible reason—aside from a feeling and a storage unit full of furniture, clothes, and a dozen half-written stories—to want to call Porto home. So why did I feel so attached?
Suddenly, the bike trip felt so easy and insignificant. I’d done it and I could do it again and I could do it better. But the real challenge now, the thing I’m not so sure I am capable of achieving, is if I’ll stay and find my place in this city that seems to be building something new and extraordinary on every corner, with or without the ordinary people just passing through.
And this is where the newsletter begins to lose its shape because I’m unsure of which direction my vulnerability is taking me and how much of it needs to be publicized before I’ve even made sense of it. But something is telling me this is enough, for now, and that I can stop right here. I don’t have to force an ending that’s not mine to write.
As always, thanks for reading and for being here…and for riding along with me. :)
Paris to Porto is officially done.
Woo hooooooo!