I forgot I was in another country

In the midst of my nightly routine, I was hit with the realization that the thought in the back of my mind, usually screaming “you’re in Portugal,” was briefly not there.

A couple of quiet seconds of my regime turned into a pit in my stomach.

My heart felt like it dropped a few centimeters as I came back to consciousness that I was 16 hours away from my friends and family.

Familiarity, now scattered across the world. This place I now know every corner of, a place so out of reach from my regular life, that I may never actually see it again.

There are several psychoanalyses I could conduct to explore the connection between this thought and my own upbringing, which involved moving around every few years. Still, this feeling of forgetting where you are is much more likely a shared experience amongst travelers and avid movers alike.

I have been volunteering for the past 2 months at an isolated hotel in southern Portugal, a 4-hour walk or 20-minute drive to the nearest very small town, and 2 hours by train to Lisbon.

I am by no means stuck, but my access to other towns requires much planning, and I chose this particular location because I wanted the desolate nature of the work. I wanted to be forced to confront thoughts I had procrastinated investigating. I wanted my free time to contain sketching, reading, and long walks. I have gotten just that, and the unexpected result was forgetting I was a 15-minute drive, a 2-hour train, and a 12-hour plane ride from my home.

That feeling makes my heart race, my head ache, and my body feel a bit uneasy. I need to hide under my bed and go run 5 miles at the same time.

As much as these feelings made me feel like a speck in the timeline of humanity, it also made the world feel so much smaller.

I forgot where I was because in reality, we’re a lot closer than we think we are.

I’ve bonded with people I don’t even speak the same language as.

I’ve curated a routine that makes me happy and accomplished by the end of the day.

And I’ve ironed so many pillows that I have memorized each bedding pattern.

These two worlds I separated — one being my traveling, creative self that’s thrived with a luxury of free-time in between shifts and the other my future-oriented, career-driven self that I built during my undergraduate years—are now collapsing into each other, becoming who I am, not a double life I’m living.

The merging of those two ideas I’ve had for myself came in the form of forgetting where I was.

Yet, as unsettling as the feeling was at first — trying to grasp the scale of my distance from the people who make my world what it is — but I think I love it.