A Luggage of Dreams: Lisbon, Longing, and the Poetry of Departure

Lisbon resists the purposeful stride of a tourist; it is a city one drifts with, like the slow, deliberate curl of cigarette smoke in a quiet room. It offers no final destination, only its persistent, melancholic company. The city is cobbled in contradictions: sunlight that feels like a half-remembered dream, steep hills that lead deliberately nowhere, and the constant ambient sound of something left eloquently unsaid. Fernando Pessoa understood this intrinsic quality. Or perhaps he was its architect conjuring a Lisbon that exists as persona, as poetry, as a lover too elusive to ever grasp yet too enchanting to ever abandon.

To read Pessoa is to wander the city's psyche. One requires no map, only a specific mood — a melancholy shaped like an empty café chair, or the sight of a yellow tram vanishing an instant before one arrives. His Lisbon is a place of half-flesh and half-fantasy, where reality is perpetually italicised. Every street maintains a shadow version of itself: one for the feet to tread, another for the mind to inhabit.

For Pessoa, Lisbon transcended the role of a mere setting. It functioned as a central character, an introverted companion perpetually wrapped in Atlantic fog and the minor key of fado. The city, mirroring its chronicler, was always turning inward. Its seven hills became metaphors for internal ascents; its miradouros, those breathtaking viewpoints, offered vistas of both the sprawling cityscape and of immense, personal solitude. Standing at the crest of Alfama, the view transcends the visual, becoming a visceral encounter where one feels the city's breath against their ribs.

This relationship was a complicated love. Pessoa never truly left Lisbon, yet he was perpetually elsewhere. A man of countless names — Bernardo Soares, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis — he scattered his essence across these heteronyms like breadcrumbs he had no intention of following back. He lived a life of imagined departures, his metaphysical luggage perpetually packed with a unique brand of wistful intelligence. Lisbon held him in its ancient embrace, yet he perpetually longed for places he had never visited, and perhaps never truly wished to.

In The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa confesses through his semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, “I am nothing. I'll never be anything. I couldn't want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.” He delivers this as a declaration of a man who has discovered more beauty in the ache of pure desire than in its mundane resolution. In this light, Lisbon reveals itself as an untranslatable feeling — a sweet, lingering sorrow one learns to inhabit.

The Architecture of Absence: Saudade and the Romance of Longing

There exists a particular kind of hunger, one entirely separate from food, that gnaws more delicately yet just as persistently. In Portuguese, it is named saudade: a word that behaves like a fine perfume, clinging to the air, it lingers in memory, and no two individuals will ever describe its scent in quite the same way. Saudade transcends simple nostalgia. It is nostalgia's more seductive and elusive relative, the one who departed town without leaving a forwarding address. It is an appetite for something you never fully possessed, or for a moment that perhaps never truly existed. It is absence, meticulously embroidered with affection. It is longing, elegantly dressed for a funeral it secretly hopes will never conclude.

Fernando Pessoa transformed saudade into a complete lifestyle. For him, it represented more than a mood or a muse; it was a form of emotional architecture. Reading Pessoa feels like overhearing a man attempting to fall out of love with his own melancholy, and failing in the most spectacular fashion. His sentences resemble stained glass: fragile, luminous, and best admired in a state of quiet contemplation. He writes to remain within the ache long enough for it to begin feeling like home, rather than to resolve any internal conflict.

His famous heteronyms — Álvaro de Campos, Bernardo Soares, Ricardo Reis — were metaphysical roommates. Each carried a separate piece of his existential luggage, each rehearsing a distinct variation of the same core despair. Together, they formed a kind of emotional council, voting daily on which particular shade of emptiness to wear. Campos was the voice that howled against the void. Reis, the intellect that sought to rationalise it. Soares simply observed and floated through it. All were united in their longing; none ever reached a destination.

And perhaps this is the heart of it, saudade is the worship of the ‘almost'. It is the tangible ache between fingers that never quite touched. A life measured not in moments lived, but with the precision of how closely they were almost reached. We all engage in this, do we not? We construct entire love affairs in our minds with people we barely know. We mourn cities we have never visited. We collect photographs of places we have never been, simply to ache with greater specificity. We cradle the ghosts of unlived lives like precious heirlooms.

This emotional masochism is not inherently tragic, I find that it often possesses a strange, compelling beauty. There exists a peculiar richness in missing what never was. It signifies an active imagination. It means the heart continues staging its private theatre, even when the cast comprises mostly shadows.

Pessoa engineered the very structure of saudade, moving beyond simply writing about it. He constructed entire literary apartments of longing and leased them to the ghosts of his imagined selves. His pages are filled with unreplied letters, clocks that tick only within dreams, and lovers described solely in hypothetical terms. Each heteronym functions as a room with different lighting — some harsh and sterile, others golden and speckled with dust. Yet all contain a single, significant detail: a chair that has never been sat in.

His genius rests in this transformation: Pessoa managed to turn a state of lack into a source of abundance. He discovered endless inspiration not in what was, but in what was not. Every absence became a potential archive. Every unfulfilled desire, a new diary entry. In doing so, he meticulously mapped an entire inner city of yearning. Lisbon, for him, was more than a home; it was the physical embodiment of his emotional landscape and a city of gentle sadness, soft colours, and alleyways that perpetually lead back to themselves.

Under Pessoa’s pen, Lisbon becomes the perfect metaphor for saudade. A place too beautiful to ever leave and too quiet to fully inhabit. Its charm resides in its profound restraint. One is always looking over the city — from a miradouro, a rooftop, the window of Tram 28 — never quite feeling entirely within it. It evokes the sensation of waiting for something to begin, with the haunting possibility that it already did, so softly you missed its arrival.

There is something oddly democratic about saudade, too. It remains indifferent to status, wealth, or age. A child missing the endless summer possesses it. An exile pining for home lives within it. A teenager staring out a car window, already soundtracking a future heartbreak with a song they do not yet understand, holds it too. Saudade is deeply Portuguese in its expression, yet it is also deeply, universally human. It is the echo you still hear from a hallway you have never walked.

The more one attempts to resolve saudade, the more it multiplies. It rewards cultivation. It is never cured by arrival, only deepened by the realisation that the longing itself was the entire plot. Fulfilment is merely the closing credits.

This is the quiet, essential trick saudade performs. It has no desire to be fixed. It asks only to be felt. Like a familiar song kept on repeat, not with the hope it will end differently, but because its specific ending makes you ache in precisely the right way.

Pessoa understood this intimately. His entire body of work stands as an homage to longing left exquisitely undisturbed, a museum of feeling suspended in mid-air. This is what grants his work its modern, vital quality. He never wrote to explain the world; he wrote to survive the parts of it that refused to make sense. He chronicled that liminal space between presence and absence, that hauntingly lovely void where the ‘almost' makes its permanent home. He turned saudade into a daily practice, a sacred ritual. And Lisbon became its eternal sanctuary — a city of stairs that lead only to more stairs, where the sea feels close enough to touch yet remains, always, one elusive block away.

It is not a place to find answers. It is a place to learn how to ask more beautiful questions. And to miss things, intensely, even while you are standing directly in front of them.

Suitcases and Ghosts: On Travelling Without Ever Leaving

True departures rarely require a boarding pass. Some are quieter, stranger, more existential than geographical. You can be halfway through brushing your teeth and suddenly apprehend that you have left some essential part of yourself behind. Not in a literal sense; the body remains, obedient as ever. But the self, the conscious ‘I', goes wandering. It sometimes leaves a note, if you are fortunate. More often, it simply slips out through a side door you never knew was there. This, perhaps, is the purest form of exile: not the physical leaving of a country, but the internal loss of alignment. You are still technically present in your life, yet it no longer fits you properly. You become emotionally jet-lagged, spiritually mislaid.

Fernando Pessoa understood this condition with an almost clinical intimacy. He never physically abandoned Lisbon, yet his interior passport must have been ragged from overuse. His writing carries the distinct weight of departures that have not yet occurred, a form of pre-emptive nostalgia, like standing at a gate before the gate has even been constructed. He wrote like a man perpetually mid-pack, his metaphysical socks rolled, his imaginary shirts folded with a kind of anxious tenderness. It is little wonder his words possess such migratory power. They were born to travel. They longed for motion before they even comprehended the concept of a destination.

We enact this same internal migration. Some of us feel profoundly displaced while sitting in rooms we have decorated with our own hands. A particular species of alienation exists hums softly, persistently, like the fluorescent buzz of an airport lounge in the deepest hours of the night. I have felt it in hotel rooms where the sheets smelled aggressively of sterility. I have felt it during dinner conversations where my jokes landed in the wrong emotional timezone. A passport is not a prerequisite for this dislocation. All that is required is a mind that refuses to sit still and a soul that perpetually rehearses its exit, even when every visible door is firmly closed.

For the artistic temperament, this often constitutes the baseline state. To want to be elsewhere, in another time, as another person. The impulse to create so frequently blooms from a refusal, or a sheer inability, to be content with a single, given reality. We write both to escape and to actively relocate the self. Some days I write because I wish to crawl back into a moment that never actually happened. Other days, I write to construct a room where such a moment could, at last, find a home.

The art becomes the luggage. The longing itself becomes the only destination worth pursuing.

I once arrived in Lisbon with a suitcase full of linen shirts and Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, which, in hindsight, was akin to bringing a tuning fork into a city already vibrating at the precise frequency of its own sad music. It was summer, yet the city carried the scent of autumn — sweet rot, soft decay, the distinctive perfume of endings. My friend’s flat overlooked a street so unremarkable it circled back into a state of pure abstraction. I sat on that small balcony for hours, watching the blank wall opposite as if it were a canvas that might suddenly blink. I was utterly, foolishly convinced it was trying to communicate something to me.

This is the essence of cities like Lisbon. They lodge themselves in the small, unassuming parts of your psyche. They become the feeling that lingers in your chest two weeks after you return home, when you catch the unexpected scent of roasting chestnuts on a familiar street. Lisbon lacks the brash volume of New York or the theatrical seduction of Paris. It invites you to overhear its quiet life, to linger long enough for its whispers to coalesce into recognisable words.

You do not truly photograph such a place. You scribble nervously in a journal, half-expecting the city to read over your shoulder. You stare at the cobbled streets as though they might spontaneously rearrange themselves into a perfect line of verse. You buy a coffee and sit with it far too long, hoping the condensation on the glass will drip into a symbol you can finally interpret.

Pessoa had no need for physical travel because he was already in a state of perpetual transit. He moved through selves instead of countries. His desk was a ticket counter for potential lives, his poems an extended layover in the territory of what-ifs. He traversed the vast continents of the soul armed with nothing more than a notebook and an ache sharp enough to cut through the very page.

And perhaps that’s the greater irony, or maybe not irony at all, but a deeper truth that the most significant journeys often commence without a passport stamp. They begin with a glance out a rain-streaked window, a single line of verse that will not leave you, a silence that feels pregnant rather than empty. They happen the moment you realise you have outgrown a former version of yourself and the only recourse is to write your way out of its confines.

The greatest odysseys are consistently internal. Pessoa never left Lisbon, yet he mapped the entire terrain of human absence. He knew that exile is a feeling that moves in, unpacks its bags, and hangs its coat in your hallway as if it owns the property.

Sometimes, when I am packing for a trip, folding clothes I may never wear and stacking books I will not finish, I think of him not as a man of literary mystery, but as a fellow traveller of the in-between.

We are all, in our own particular ways, travellers. Some carry cameras, others carry wounds. Some collect passport stamps. Others, shadows. And some of us — the foolish ones, perhaps — carry poems, unread letters, and the resonant names of cities we have never seen.

Because even when we never physically leave, something within us is always, perpetually, departing.

Dreams Deferred: Exile as a Creative Practice

There exists a wild, generative fertility within longing. It is rarely pleasant, yet it is consistently fertile. Art does not typically blossom from a place of comfort; it claws its way through cracks in the pavement, blooming defiantly where logic says it should not survive, much like a poppy on a construction site. Fernando Pessoa understood this principle intimately. His work was never the fruit of contentment or fulfilment. It represented the deliberate flowering of absence, a slow, meticulous blooming in soil composed entirely of sighs and unspoken words.

When you are removed from what you desire — not merely distanced, but exiled with a sense of finality — your mind is compelled to reconstruct the object of your longing in impossible, exquisite detail. It becomes grander and more luminous than it ever was in reality. Sharper, lovelier, and permanently untouchable in both the best and worst ways. This is why longing so often produces such resonant work: it operates free from the heavy gravity of the actual. It floats, it gleams, it achieves a grandeur that reality could seldom sanction. Exile performs this strange alchemy; it dramatises that very distance until the space itself transforms into art, instead of simply creating distance from what you want.

Pessoa's poetry derives its enduring potency from this very condition. He never obtained what he truly wanted, and he possessed a deep-seated distrust that reality could ever provide it. Why settle for the actual, flawed world when the imagined one could be embroidered to absolute perfection? His writing perfumes a thirst with an essence that lingers long after the final line of a poem has been read.

There exists a distinct aesthetic heroism in consciously choosing longing over satisfaction. It is an impractical stance, yet it carries a deep, romantic charge. Examine any great piece of art and you will discover, stitched into its very lining, a small, potent packet of heartbreak. The most enduring songs are often composed at the airport gate. The most memorable films conclude on the precipice of “what if." The finest poems hold their central questions tenderly, like a cherished letter you re-read endlessly but never feel compelled to answer.

And perhaps this is why exile, whether self-imposed or enforced, has yielded some of the world's most haunting artistic expressions. James Baldwin’s Paris functioned as a vital balm for his creative spirit. Nina Simone’s Switzerland provided a charged stage for her defiance. They wrote from its perimeter, peering inward with vision sharpened by geographical and emotional distance. Exile acts as a refining fire, a distillation process that removes all excess. What remains is the pure, potent essence of the ache itself.

Pessoa, curiously, resided in Lisbon his entire life, yet he was, without question, emotionally expatriated. Lisbon was never his comfort zone; it was his chosen haunting ground. He wandered its familiar streets like a perpetual tourist in the narrative of his own existence. A line from The Book of Disquiet captures this perfectly: “I wasn’t meant for reality but life came and found me.” This is the Pessoa condition in a single, devastating breath: a man caught red-handed in the act of existing, all the while dreaming of a purer abstraction.

Exile does not always arrive wrapped in the grand narratives of geopolitics or overt tragedy. Sometimes its manifestation is far subtler. It can arrive as a persistent sense of misfitting, of pressing your life against your skin and feeling it bunch awkwardly at the seams. You are present, technically. But emotionally and spiritually, you are perpetually elsewhere, floating just above the room like the steam from your own cup of tea.

Yet this fundamental discomfort operates as more than a curse; it is a creative furnace. Artists often thrive in the threshold spaces — between languages, between identities, between conflicting selves. This is the very territory where Pessoa permanently camped. He was not one man, but several simultaneous inhabitants of a single body. Álvaro de Campos embodied a sharp, futuristic rage. Ricardo Reis adopted the posture of a stoic classicist. Bernardo Soares was the melancholic clerk burdened by an excess of thought and a deficit of will. Pessoa fractured his identity to feel more completely. Each heteronym served as a distinct vessel for a different variety of exile, a unique flavour of internal distance.

I have felt quieter versions of this displacement myself. That haunting sensation of being elsewhere, even while sitting in my own house, wearing my softest socks. It is the experience of missing people who are still present in your life, or pining for a version of yourself that has become elusive: the one who was bold, who believed without reservation, who sat down to write and did not stop halfway to scroll through a digital void. That essential self often feels like it resides somewhere else entirely — perhaps in Lisbon, or Kyoto, or on a quiet train journey between nowhere in particular.

There is a quiet, persistent grief to this internal homelessness. But within it also flickers a peculiar power. Because when you are not fully here, you are also, necessarily, a little bit there in the dream, in the imagined future, on the blank page. The work we create from this liminal space is electrically charged; it carries a distinct voltage. This is why some of the greatest art is, at its heart, a record of a failed arrival, a suitcase packed with emotions that never quite clear the customs of conventional life.

Thus, the artist becomes a species of perpetual migrant, not of countries, but of selves. A romantic fugitive moving through imagined conversations and alternate timelines, carrying entire continents of feeling. The creative spark ignites in the friction between desire and destination. The poem becomes a flare thrown up from the border of the understood self, a souvenir sent back from a place that does not technically exist, yet somehow still feels more like home than anywhere else.

Pessoa never waited for satisfaction to find him. He wrote directly from within the heart of the ache. He used longing as his primary ink. He stitched absence into rhythm and crafted a lasting symphony from shadows. Perhaps this is what we are all engaged in, each in our own way: composing lullabies for our lost selves, packing for places we may never see, writing letters to the parts of us that remain eternally in transit.

Because ultimately, every true piece of art functions as a piece of luggage for our dreams. They may be deferred, yes. But they are never, ever discarded.

The City That Writes You Back

Some cities merely house you; they provide a roof, a bed, a street for your daily passage. Others possess a more transformative power and they actively write you. Lisbon, with its faded grandeur and stubborn, soulful character, belongs definitively to this second category. It compels you to stop, to listen to the rustle of its trams, the low murmur of the Tagus River, the whisper of its cobblestones as though they are confiding ancient secrets.

Lisbon exists in a state of constant dialogue with its own gentle melancholy. When you step into this ongoing conversation, when you walk its narrow streets where time feels both suspended and infinitely slow, you cannot help but absorb its essence. A specific sensation lingers, akin to a conversation half-heard, with words hanging in the humid air that promise a deeper, almost-grasped meaning. You depart the city carrying more questions than answers, your heart heavy with words you never managed to transcribe.

Fernando Pessoa understood this dynamic perfectly. He wrote directly from its substance. Lisbon functioned as a living, breathing character — a lover, a mother, a persistent phantom. The city became an extension of his own longing, each street a line in his poetry, each weathered building an unfinished verse. In return, the city refused him any rest. It resisted resolution, mirroring his own deliberate refusal to be defined or complete. Lisbon, in its quiet, insistent way, held him captive, making him irrevocably its own.

I recall walking through the Baixa district one late afternoon, feeling the heavy, golden warmth of the sun stretch across the pavement. The city felt different that day, revealing itself as the demanding entity that insists on being truly understood. I found myself pausing before a small, unremarkable bookstore, the kind that makes no fuss yet seems to hold immense, quiet knowledge. Stepping inside, I was met by the faint, comforting scent of ageing paper and old leather. The shelves were stacked with volumes that appeared untouched for decades. Wandering through the aisles, I felt like a ghost myself, until I stumbled upon a faded copy of Mensagem.

It was a small moment, one that would seem entirely unremarkable to anyone unfamiliar with Pessoa, yet for me, it felt like a quiet, personal surrender. The book, worn and softened by the years, seemed to have been waiting. In that instant, the city wrote me back. It whispered its true name through the fragile pages of Pessoa’s verse. Lisbon had found me, just as it had once found him.

There is a distinctive sadness in Lisbon, though it is never tragic. It is the sadness that accompanies a beauty which is no longer fresh yet continues to burn with a soft, persistent flame. It is the gentle ache of something that has been deeply loved, then left behind something irretrievably lost, yet cherished precisely for its absence. The city holds a mirror to the human condition itself. It asks you not to forget it, nor to romanticise it into impossible perfection, but to hold it exactly as it is. Flawed. Struggling. Yet vibrantly alive.

Perhaps it is this very tension, this persistent, creative ache, that forges Lisbon into the artistic furnace it remains. Pessoa wandered Lisbon, allowing its spirit to permeate his being. His words, like those of so many others drawn to its light, are saturated with the city's unique disquiet. It is here, amidst the sun-drenched alleys and cracked, colourful façades, that writers are born, or perhaps reborn. Lisbon refuses to let them depart unchanged. It insists they leave carrying something more than they arrived with — a deeper, more resonant sense of loss, yet also a kind of quiet revelation. A promise that what is lost is never entirely gone.

Lisbon offers stories to you, over and over again, in new shapes and with new layers of meaning. It writes itself into your constitution, the way a lover’s scent clings to your skin, resisting all attempts to wash it away. And like Pessoa, you begin to understand that you were never meant to leave completely. Because Lisbon wants you to stay a little longer, to wrestle with its ghosts, and to carry them with you, wherever your physical journey may lead.

Is this not the ultimate gift of this particular exile — that the city never truly releases you, even when your body is long gone? The city inscribes you into its eternal pulse, and you remain, a permanent part of its fabric, etched into its pavement and lingering in the narrow spaces between its ancient streets.

Because Lisbon, like all truly great cities, does not simply live in its past. It exists vibrantly in the people who walk its hills. The artists who cannot help but be reshaped by its light. The poets who drink their coffee slowly, in contemplative silence, wondering if they will ever capture even a fraction of its essence. It is more than a place. It is a persistent dream, one that never truly abandons you, even long after you have departed.

The View from Elsewhere

I often find myself questioning whether we are ever truly present in a moment, or whether we exist in a state of perpetual emotional preparation for the next. Perhaps this is the source of Fernando Pessoa’s enduring resonance. He never feigns arrival at a final destination. He writes consistently from the departure lounge of his own soul, a space of transition that feels intimately familiar.

There’s a reason we romanticise train stations and airports; they are the architecture of liminality. Neither here nor there, they cradle the delicate poetry of ‘almost’. This is the emotional territory so many of us inhabit. We are perpetually on the cusp — just about to fall in love, just about to move, just about to write the defining work, become the idealised person, change the trajectory of a life. We exist in a state of perpetual imminence.

Yet perhaps the essential beauty resides not in the arrival, but in the luggage itself. In the dreams we meticulously pack and re-pack, never fully certain of our destination, secure only in the knowledge that we remain in motion. We are still searching, still yearning, still aching with a beautiful, generative intensity.

Pessoa would have understood this condition with absolute clarity. He dedicated his life to writing postcards from a place he never fully reached. A place called Lisbon, certainly, but also a more elusive destination: a true home within the self. A place where language might finally contain the ache, where longing would transform from a symptom of dislocation into an entire aesthetic style.

The truth we so often evade is that we never truly arrive. Not in cities, not in love, not even within the sprawling narrative of our own lives. We are permanent residents of the airport lounge of the self, forever watching departure boards and wondering why our flight remains uncalled. Pessoa not only grasped this, he constructed an entire literary canon around the existential layover.

Maybe this is the fundamental point. That longing is a central feature of our consciousness, not a flaw in the human design. That saudade is a creative womb — the fertile ground from which poems, paintings, midnight confessions, and unsent letters are born. We long, and in doing so, we are compelled to create. We ache, and through that ache, we assert the significance of our inner world.

Lisbon offers a specific ambiance, a foggy clarity, streets that spiral inward rather than leading to a definitive conclusion. Pessoa’s presence still permeates this atmosphere, lingering in the corners of its cafés and the elegant curves of its azulejo walls. He does not walk beside you, but remains eternally ahead, always just about to turn the next corner.

And perhaps this is our proper domain as well. Here on the edge of elsewhere, suitcase in hand, dreaming not of the entire universe of poetry made possible only by the state of delay itself.

S xoxo

Written in Lisbon, Portugal

15th March 2025