Saudade

I knew Saudade (pronounce the first d but the end sounds like the end of sausage) long before I set foot on Portuguese soil, before I had read Saramago, before pasteis de nata settled in my belly and left a mustache of powdered sugar behind just above my upper lip. She was not my oldest friend, the soul on earth I had known longer than anyone except my mother, brother and three cousins. That distinction belonged to David from kindergarten and Saudade and I were fresher than that. She had left Northampton with me and stayed by my side in Cambridge. Once I moved back to Long Island I didn't see her for a number of years but by the time I stepped foot in 32 School Street, she had traveled to London, Paris, and Bali and back with me. We finished each other's sentences by the time hospice wheeled my father's body out the front door of 1552 North Street.

Saudade is the Portuguese concept of melancholic longing for those you have loved who are absent and for the places you have loved that are distant, the homesickness for a home to which you cannot remember, the lovesickness for a lover you cannot ever have again or may never have in the future. She was a total bitch in my thirties when an eleven year old relationship disintegrated before my eyes and my life, unbeknownst to many, became a living soap opera, one permanently changing its trajectory.

The breakup was ugly and messy. At a support dinner with friends about one week into it, we had managed to name at least 14 people other than me with whom my boyfriend had had sex, including two men. After the fourteenth unveiling I called an end to it. I couldn't take anymore. He had broken my heart, broken my ability to trust any other human being and what came to be the worst after effect, broken my ability to trust myself. I had missed it all. I had chosen him, I had loved him and in the adult years during which we were together, I hadn't ever seen who he really was. Had I ever really looked?

I had known him since I was 12 years old and had been in love with him since I was 14 despite his ninth grade marriage proposal, the insanity of which I laughed out loud at. Cut to standing in a parking lot as a thirty two year old woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown screaming, "Who are you?" while simultaneously screaming in my own head "Who am I?" I had unwittingly endangered my own health and life, had to have an AIDS test, courts eventually joined our breakup briefly and an actual representative from Judge Judy phoned to invite me (us? Didn't you read Judge Judy--there was no more us) onto their show in California. I told no one (would you?). Indicative of the confused state I was in, somehow Judge Judy, not the AIDS test, was rock bottom for me. Right after that I turned into a social, and certainly a sexual, hermit. To cement my new status, I gained 60 pounds of further insulation from the outside world.

Over the last eighteen years there have been a few first dates, even fewer second ones. One kind, sweet man who clearly adored me and would have been very good to me stood at my front door bewildered as I told him I was not for him. "I'm broken. I'm damaged. I can't," I said. Years of therapy have not fixed that damage. Even before the soap opera began I had been singular and reclusive by nature. As a thinker I require significant alone time in which to speculate, learn, dream. As someone thirsty for knowledge, I need time to read and absorb. As a writer, reflection, often in the form of nighttime insomnia, is and always has been part of me. In some ways spending the last eighteen years alone hasn't been that difficult. Yes, there are times I crave companionship, times I crave intimacy. I remain largely without human touch, even a hug, for weeks if not months on end, hence the brood of cats. I don't know if I have regrown the ability to be vulnerable to someone else. I don't know if I am even willing to try. But still I yearn. Saudade is with me. I see in the distance the home for which I am homesick.

Portugal calls to me nostalgically. I feel a richness waiting for me there which has nothing to do with retirement finances and everything to do with my soul. When we grapple for existential meaning over the intersection of free will and randomness, I allow that perhaps these isolated years have been preparation for this moment. During them I have distanced myself from American obsessions with things and stuff like cars (nothing like a tree killing your car to disabuse you of that one). I have summarily rejected the marriage and children paradigm. For various reasons, I find myself now distanced from the emotional tethers that typically hold one to particular places but more so, people. After my brother voted for Trump, the emotional distance between us grew cataclysmic and as my mother approaches her 80th birthday in good health I see mortality clutching at her side. Although I consider myself deeply sentimental, it is clear that even my closest friends, of which there are few, are held not by proximity but via internet connection and the occasional in person visit. More than a year ago I changed my Twitter profile to read, "witness to a dying democracy." I am now also distanced from nearly everything I held dear in America. Alienated, I feel like I have already been living in exile. And I have. Over the last twenty years, I have become substantially exiled from myself.

It's time to go home.