A City That Holds My Questions

That evening, the familiar sound of the number 28 tram echoed through the narrow streets. The sun had not yet fully disappeared, and the Tagus River shimmered faintly, like a mirror to my drifting thoughts.

I paused at a corner in the old town, watching the yellow tram climb the hill, its body gliding through Lisbon’s worn stone like a brushstroke from another time. It moved just as Pessoa once described: steady, familiar, quietly enduring.

Rather than board it, I wandered without a fixed direction, walking through alleyways guided more by feeling than by plan. I had arrived in Lisbon carrying a sensation I couldn’t quite name. The Portuguese call it saudade, a tender ache for something lost, or perhaps never truly found. I didn’t know what I was searching for. Only that the longing was real.

Around me, tiled facades, crumbling staircases, and weathered balconies whispered with presence, as if someone had just left, or never really had. Pessoa had written countless lines about this city, yet I sensed it wasn’t the streets he longed for, but the version of himself that passed through them each day: lost in thought, quietly becoming.

Eventually, I stepped onto the tram. Resting against the wooden seat, I watched the silhouettes outside blur past. When we reached Chiado, I pressed the bell, not out of necessity, but out of curiosity. I wanted to see that café he used to frequent.

A Brasileira felt warmer at dusk than during the day. A small group of tourists gathered around his bronze statue, while I slipped inside, choosing a seat by the window. The dark wood walls and mirrored panels wrapped the space in a quiet calm, as though time itself had slowed down.

I ordered an espresso and a pastel de nata, sitting in silence, trying to trace the moments that might have once belonged to him. Perhaps he, too, had sat by this very window after a weary day, watching people pass by, wondering how to shape his inner chaos into verse.

He once wrote:

I am the outskirts of a non-existent village, the preface to an unwritten book.

His characters were more vivid than he was. The unfinished sentences revealed more of him than anything else. I could almost see him sitting across from me, sharing a quiet understanding that transcended time.

The café wasn’t large, but it had a comforting sense of scale. The floorboards creaked softly, the chandelier scattered gentle light, and the porcelain cups on the tables gave off a subdued gleam. Outside, the city pulsed with restless energy, but in here, time had slowed, as if the noise had been left behind at the door.

Pessoa wrote here, perhaps in the same way I sat, listening to the clink of cups, staring at vague reflections in the window. Picking up a napkin, he might have scribbled lines that seemed trivial to others, but to him, they were necessary.

His handwriting was hurried, many words illegible, but he had to write, because without it, he couldn’t survive.

I pulled out my notebook and opened it to a blank page, but found myself unsure of what to write. Should I describe this old café’s atmosphere? Or the imagined presence of a lonely soul from another time?

A waiter passed by and asked gently, “Tudo bem?”

I nodded. Yes, I was okay. I’d just realised that writing is sometimes nothing more than a way to stay connected to the world. Not to say anything in particular. Not because anyone needs to hear it. But simply to give fleeting feelings a place to land.

I looked out the window. Dusk was deepening, and streetlamps had started to glow. The city seemed to shed its skin and slip into something softer, more intimate.

Pessoa’s statue still sat outside, staring into the street with hollow eyes that seemed to see right through me. I had a strange thought: maybe he never really left Lisbon. Maybe he simply stepped behind time, waiting for strangers like me to rediscover him at dusk.

I stopped trying to write something meaningful. I closed my notebook and ran my fingers around the rim of the empty coffee cup. In that moment, I understood: what exhausts us most in a foreign land is not the solitude itself, but the inability to speak it aloud, and the absence of anyone willing to listen.

Pessoa was like a mirror, sitting beside me, silently reminding me: even without a response, expression still matters.

Leaving the café, I walked slowly along Rua Garrett. More people had filled the street, but the lamps were still dim, the air tinged with dinner scents. I wasn’t headed anywhere in particular, just moving with the fading light. Then I saw it: the sign that read Bertrand — I had arrived at the world’s oldest operating bookstore.

Many stopped to take photos by the plaque, but I stood quietly, gazing at the heavy wooden door. I imagined how it looked when it first opened over two centuries ago, paper fresh with ink, visitors in long coats, clutching letters and hats.

Inside, the world hushed. The smell of paper and wood lingered in the air. Rows of tall bookshelves stood like silent sentinels, holding thoughts waiting to be understood. I didn’t look for any book in particular. I wandered between shelves, fingers brushing spines as if touching unnamed destinies.

I found myself, inevitably, in the Fernando Pessoa section. His works sat quietly together, some thick, some slim, some in Portuguese, others in English, but all infused with the same essence: fragmented, restless, silent, uncertain. Like the echo of footsteps in a lonely street.

I pulled out Livro do Desassossego and flipped it open. My heart skipped at the line I landed on:

If I ever find financial comfort enough to write and publish freely, I know I’ll miss this life of writing little and publishing less.

He wasn’t lamenting poverty. He was quietly honouring those invisible moments, the unfinished drafts, the scraps of thoughts on envelopes, the words that never found their place. Imperfect, messy, incomplete, but real.

I remembered myself on airplanes, late nights, near breakdowns, scribbling shapeless emotions into notebooks. No structure. No meaning. Just something that told me I was still alive, even if only through crooked, hurried words.

I sat on a wooden bench tucked in the corner, my mind drifting far away. Pessoa had built a vast, fractured world within this city, and I, too, was searching for a shape I could call my own. Not an identity, but a way of being. A way to doubt, to struggle, to believe, and to be soft again.

He invented over eighty heteronyms, giving each a name, a voice, and a style. Some wrote poetry. Some prose. Some were sharp, others chaotic. He built a quiet city in his mind, where all these parts could coexist — an endless, internal gathering of selves.

Outside, the light was fading. A man stood leaning by the door, reading under the soft streetlamp. His silhouette reminded me again of Pessoa, someone standing on the edge of the crowd, watching the world quietly, writing down the moment just to leave a trace behind.

I watched him for a while, feeling an unexpected kinship: two strangers tethered by silence and ink. Then, I reached into my bag. My own notebook was there. I smiled. It was my own Book of Disquiet. It wouldn’t sit on anyone’s shelf or be translated, but it carried every night I’d survived, every absurd thought, every fragment of unfinished poetry.

I didn’t go straight home after leaving the bookstore. Lisbon at night feels like a scene shift in a play. The lights come on, the day folds away its loose ends, and the city slips into something more tender. People line up outside restaurants, and the sound of trams fades into the distance.

Bairro Alto awakens, the bars, the fado clubs, the miniature theatres all open their doors softly into the dark.

I pushed open a small wooden door to a fado club a friend had told me about. The room was dimly lit, the wood floors creaked, and a lone chandelier hovered like a star barely holding itself together.

When the music began, everyone fell silent.

The opening notes of the guitar felt like a sigh. Not sorrow, not bitterness, just time, moving too fast, and the heart, too full, exhaling all it couldn’t say.

The singer stood in the corner in a deep blue dress. She had no microphone, but every word sounded like it was meant just for you. I didn’t understand the Portuguese lyrics, but the emotion was clear, as if someone were standing beside me, whispering, I know what you're searching for, even if you haven’t said it yet.

I thought of that line from Su Shi’s First Prose of the Red Cliffs:

Its sound is like weeping, like longing, like pleading, lingering like silk, endless as mist.

That’s exactly what fado feels like. It doesn’t resist fate. It accepts its shape and dissolves it, turning it into something you can finally swallow: poetry.

During the intermission, I ordered a glass of red wine. It was dry, almost sharp, like a memory not yet ready to be remembered. I looked at the singer’s profile on stage and suddenly recalled a quote from Nietzsche:

Without music, life would be a mistake.

I used to think I understood what he meant. But in that dim fado club, under that flickering chandelier, the words felt like a new confession, aimed directly at the silent parts of my heart.

The music continued. And I thought: Lisbon belongs to the night.

The Portuguese eat late, and the real fado doesn’t begin until after midnight. Daytime feels like a rehearsal. The true living happens at night. I slowly adjusted to this rhythm, writing in the afternoons, wandering through the old town at dusk, listening to songs in the dark.

Living here has little to do with efficiency. It’s more concerned with feeling. Are you tired today? Do you have time to sit with yourself? Did a memory suddenly rise and stop you as you walked?

When I left the fado club, I felt as though the night had gently wrapped itself around me again. Fado doesn’t ask you to cheer up. It doesn’t try to console you. It simply brings you out of your shell for a while. Even if all you do is sit there and listen, it feels like you've cried without tears. Your body softens, and your mind quiets.

I followed the stone steps down toward the shimmering Tagus. The music still echoed faintly in my ears, though I wasn’t sure if it was the last note of the song, or something still stirring inside me. A strange question rose in my mind: Did Pessoa ever listen to fado?

I don’t know. But I believe he would understand this way of turning emotion into rhythm. He channelled his unrest through language, housed his loneliness in more than eighty names, and slowly carved his fragmented self into something that now feels like Lisbon’s soul.

On the walk home, the streets were empty. Tree shadows flickered under the orange streetlights, and the cobblestones shimmered slightly from the sea air. Few people passed by. Occasionally, a car’s headlights swept across the road and quickly vanished. The city felt like a stage after the curtain had dropped: audiences lingering, but the show already over.

When I got home, I walked slowly up the stairs and unlocked the door. A soft wave of leftover warmth greeted me. I didn’t turn on the lights right away. Instead, I cracked open the window just enough to let the night drift in.

I lit a stick of incense, poured myself a glass of red wine, and let my body sink into the sofa. The room was silent. Only the scent of the incense moved, gently, like a veil unfolding in the air, wrapping itself around me.

It wasn’t a sad night. But in this kind of quiet, memories rise like mist. I thought of people I never got to properly say goodbye to. People I’d met on the road: strangers who briefly entered my life and then disappeared again. And others, more significant, who made me pause, hesitate, take detours, and double back.

I picked up my pen and wrote a single line:

What we spend our lives searching for isn’t always somewhere far away. Sometimes, it’s a song that allows us to stop.

A place where we can simply sit and be.

It’s taken me a long time to understand Pessoa’s usage of heteronyms. At first, I was only confused. Why would anyone need so many names to write? It felt fractured. Lonely, even. I wondered if he simply wanted to speak differently, or maybe he needed an excuse to say the unspeakable.

But over time, I realised he wasn’t hiding behind those names. He was giving voice to the many selves that couldn’t be contained within one identity. He wasn’t creating characters — he was making space. A place for contradictions, for tension, for all the parts that didn’t fit neatly together. He allowed them to exist. To speak. To feel.

For Pessoa, writing was permission to remain complex, conflicted, even fractured, and still be authentic.

If I were bound by identity, he once wrote, I wouldn’t be able to enter the imagined world and create this person.

When I read that line for the first time, it felt like I was hearing my own long-suppressed confession.

I thought about everything I’ve written over the years. The shifts in tone, voice, even language. Sometimes I’m the poet on a plane scribbling between time zones. Sometimes I’m the immigrant trying to retranslate herself into a new culture. And sometimes, I’m the silent observer in a crowd, watching from the edges like a spy of emotion.

I once created a character named Nora in a novel. She had no fixed nationality, no traditional family structure. She travelled across four continents and eventually chose to live in seclusion on an island. I used to think she was a fictional creation. But later I realised she was a version of me I hadn’t lived yet. Or perhaps, she was the very life I was already living.

By writing her, I was writing myself. The parts I couldn’t face directly, she lived through. The thoughts I couldn’t voice, she said for me. Writing became the way I made sense of life, the way I preserved my awareness, organised the chaos. When I stopped writing, I felt like I began to fade.

And then I came across Pessoa. Someone who lived out the phrase writing is existence more completely, more bravely than I ever had.

The first time I read him was during lockdown in London. His sentences felt like riddles, yet they built entire inner worlds. After his death, more than 25,000 manuscript pages were found: some poems, some essays, some just fragments of thought.

His desk drawer was like a secret archive. His heteronyms debated, criticised, and encouraged one another. Like an internal dialogue split into voices, each with its own signature, each made real through ink and paper.

It helped me understand why Pessoa kept people at a distance. Some said he was strange, unfriendly, and hard to approach. But when I read his words, all I felt was tenderness, a quiet gentleness, a kind of self-protection that didn’t want to disturb anyone else. The world was too loud. And he had carved out a space inside himself that was still, fragile, and deeply quiet. Letting others in might break it.

I, too, flinch at noisy rooms. When strangers get too close, I instinctively take a step back. It’s not fear. It’s just that I carry too much inside. I don’t know where to begin. It’s like having drawers stuffed with unsent letters, pulling one out, and a dozen come spilling down.

One day, I visited his old apartment, Casa Fernando Pessoa. It was small but startlingly bright, like his prose: sharp, clean, unpretentious. The chair at his desk was empty, as if he had just stepped out. Books and notebooks filled the shelves: literature, philosophy, religion, science, each one a path he took to reach the world. In that modest room, he built an entire forest of consciousness.

I stood at his desk and felt my eyes sting. I don’t know why. Maybe because I felt seen, finally. The greatest dream of any writer is to have a corner in the world that asks for no explanation. Just a place to sit. To write. To be.

He once wrote:

So many thoughts flash through my mind that I must always carry a notebook. Even then, I lose pages. Sometimes I write too fast, and the words are illegible.

I knew exactly what he meant. Those sentences aren’t chosen; they arrive. And your only duty is to let them through.

I am merely an empty conduit, I once wrote in my diary, through which the words pass.

In that moment, I stopped trying to define myself through writing. I no longer needed to build a coherent self. I just wanted to offer a landing place for those unshaped thoughts, those unnamed whispers that needed somewhere to rest.

When I stepped out of Pessoa’s house, the sun was already sinking. I walked the streets he once walked, slow and light, as though tracing the echo of his footsteps. He left behind so many fragments, and I finally understood: writing doesn’t have to produce something whole. Sometimes, it’s simply an answer. A response to a city, a moment, or a silence.

Maybe I wasn’t searching for a writer at all.

Maybe I was looking for what he represents: a place where language can take root.

His words made me believe Lisbon has a hidden dimension, one only visible to those who’ve never quite belonged anywhere else.

During the darkest months of lockdown in London, I told my online book club that once the world opened up again, the first place I’d go would be Lisbon.

It was a promise, an act of faith for the self who still wrote, even in the dark.

Now I’m here. Walking the streets he walked. Sitting in cafés where he once sat. Reading his half-finished lines. Listening to songs he might have missed.

I didn’t come to worship him.

I came to have a conversation with him, yes.

But more than that, with myself.

At five in the morning, I stepped out of the apartment. The streets were deserted. Leaves rustled softly in the breeze. Every so often, I passed a street cleaner, or caught sight of a cat slipping quietly across an empty square. The sky was beginning to pale.

I sat down on a stone step, pulled out my notebook, and wrote:

You once asked me, “Are you still searching for home?”

I can answer you now.

It’s not that I’ve found a place that will never change.

It’s that I’ve finally realised: I no longer need one.

Home, to me, is not a fixed space I can claim or keep. It’s a moment when the world holds me gently. When I feel understood, even if only by a streetlamp, a stranger’s nod, or the sound of my own pen on paper.

I may never belong to any one place. But I’ve learned how to place myself through writing. I’ve learned how to leave a light on for myself in the chaos. How to build a city on a blank page. How to dig a well in a single line. Somewhere for my thoughts to drink, to rest, to flow.

Today, at my core, I remain quietly pessimistic, but I’m full of hope for the future. Because I’m still here. And being alive means having everything.

I love to laugh. I also love silence. I treasure every tiny, beautiful thing: the slow steam rising from a coffee cup on a rainy day; a couple holding hands as they turn a corner; a glance exchanged in a dark fado bar.

I’ve crossed four continents. None of them ever fully claimed me. But through writing, I’ve grown roots: not into land, but into language. My existence doesn’t need to be understood. It doesn’t need applause. It only needs to be recorded.

This is who I am: sharp-edged, but soft. Lonely, but full.

And now, at last, I can say it:

Lisbon didn’t cure my saudade, but gave it a home.
Not by offering answers, but by making space for the questions I still carry.