Freedom Found Me at the Edge of Europe
If you're reading this today, chances are someone, somewhere, is setting off fireworks for Independence Day. I've been thinking about another kind of freedom entirely...
I found myself standing at the westernmost point of continental Europe, convinced I’d come to Portugal to let something go.
Looking back now, I think I misunderstood the assignment.
I just didn’t recognize it yet.
There’s a stone marker at the Cabo da Roca lighthouse with a line carved into it. Onde a terra se acaba e o mar começa. Where the land ends and the sea begins.
It felt almost too on the nose. I wasn’t chasing a view. I was looking for a place big enough to hold my grief. Apparently, I decided the edge of a continent would do.
I actually laughed standing there because I wasn’t even subtle with my coping mechanisms. I remember thinking I understood exactly what kind of trip this was. The kind you take somewhere far enough to grieve properly.
Cliff in front of me. The Atlantic stretching endlessly beyond them. I was certain the whole trip would be one long subtraction.
Then, a few days later, I signed up for a food tour. You know the kind.
Eight strangers. Someone carrying a little laminated flag. A slow parade through Lisbon’s back streets in search of bifana (pork sandwich), pastel de nata (custard tart), and tiny glasses of ginjinha (Portuguese liqueur made from sour cherries) at eleven in the morning like that’s a perfectly reasonable hour. Apparently, in Portugal, it is.
Next to me stood a woman ordering her second glass of ginjinha. Dry sense of humor. The kind where you spend the first ten minutes trying to decide whether she’s joking.
Jessica.
We talked through the entire tour. Nothing particularly profound. Just the easy kind of conversation that happens when neither person expects to see the other again. Nobody’s trying to be interesting. You’re simply... there.
Somewhere between the custard tarts and the second ginjinha, I realized something wonderfully ordinary. I liked her. Not dramatically. Just in that quiet, unmistakable way you recognize someone you could actually be friends with if life happened to make room for it.
Eventually the tour came to an end. Everyone said, “It was so nice meeting you.” And everyone began drifting back toward their own lives.
Looking back, what stays with me isn’t that I asked for her number. It’s how close I came to not asking.
One polite goodbye. One “Have a great trip.” One of those hugs you give someone you’re almost certain you’ll never see again. That’s all it would’ve taken. Jessica would’ve become one more lovely stranger whose name slowly disappeared into the blur of a good trip.
Months later, that’s the part I keep returning to. I thought my life was only taking things away from me. But life, it turns out, has very little interest in waiting for one chapter to end before beginning another. The addition didn’t wait politely for the subtraction to finish. It arrived anyway.
Standing there on the cliff, near the red lighthouse, I thought that inscription was telling me I’d arrived at a place where things end. Maybe it was. But I think I misread it that day. Because where the land ends and the sea begins isn’t only about endings.
It’s about standing at a threshold where two realities exist at once. Endings and beginnings have been sharing the same coordinates all along. One landscape disappears. Another quietly begins. You just don’t always know which one you’re standing in until you’re far enough away to look back.
Maybe this is what freedom has always been.
It’s the soft knowing, the privilege of deciding which direction deserves your next step.
Love and aloha always,
P.S. I have to tell you the rest because it’s too good to leave out.
Jessica and I still talk almost every week. I’m flying out to see her in October. What started as strangers sharing plates of bifana became one of my closest friendships.
Since then, we’ve celebrated each other’s wins, cried over losses, traded voice notes, and kept showing up for each other long after Portugal became a memory.
And I almost let our story end with, “It was so nice meeting you.”
Field Notes
🎵 Currently Playing
📖 Worth Reading
Theo of Golden - Allen Levi
A mysterious stranger from Portugal comes to a southern town in Georgia called Golden and quietly alters the lives of the people around him. I felt like this would be the perfect companion to my story because both ask the same question: What if a person who changes your life first arrives as a stranger?
🎒 Travel Favorite
Asking for someone’s number.
Sometimes the best souvenir isn’t something you bring home.
It’s someone.
One last thing…
A page from the Portugal letter I’m mailing to Lounge 143 members:
If this felt like the kind of story you’d like to receive in your mailbox, I’d be honored to write to you. Because some stories pass through your feed. Others find their way into your hands.