Some journeys are planned, the others find you on a quiet afternoon, over coffee, in a city you never meant to stay in.
I wasn’t supposed to stay in Lisbon. It was just a stopover of two nights to reset after the flight, pick up a few things, and to catch the ferry south. Morocco was the plan, for a slower summer, to write, or maybe to vanish a little…
It was late June, and the heat had already started to settle in like a certainty. That afternoon I found a café by accident, tucked into a corner of Alfama, shaded by a lemon tree and flanked by a wall of climbing vines. The tables spilled unevenly onto the cobblestone, as if even they were reluctant to stay indoors. I took a seat in the shade and ordered an espresso I didn’t really want.
About ten minutes later, an older man approached my table. Linen shirt, walking stick, kind eyes. He asked if he could sit since it was the only table in the shade. I said yes. We didn’t speak for a while, which I liked. Then, softly, he said, “June in Lisbon is all about staying still.”
I smiled. “And I’m doing the opposite.”
Not long after, a third person joined us, a younger woman, maybe in her early thirties. She looked flustered, sun-dazed, holding a sketchbook and a camera. She asked us, total strangers, apparently, how to say “cracked light” in Portuguese. Neither of us knew, but the man offered a story about stained glass in a cathedral up north. It was something about a poet calling it God’s kaleidoscope. She immediately wrote it down, and I tucked it away in my head.
We sat like that for over an hour. Three strangers, talking, not talking, not knowing where the next moment would lead us. We shared our water, and eventually a forgotten basket of bread that someone left on the wrong table. The breeze carried the scent of grilled fish from a nearby street.
When we parted, it was without ceremony. The girl sketched the table before she left in quick, loose lines. The man gave me a card with nothing but his name, Antonio, and a street address in case I ever got lost.
I was supposed to leave the next morning.
Instead, I cancelled the ferry. Booked a small room near the café, told myself I’d stay a week, maybe two, just to write and catch my breath. But beneath that, I knew something had shifted, quietly, like a tide turning in its sleep and a new thought had taken root in my head:
Sometimes we go looking for answers in far-off places.
And sometimes, they’re waiting for us at a small café table, under a lemon tree, in a city we never meant to stay in.
