There is a certain music missing and it isn’t yours. No music to play when arriving or departing. No music bouncing cleanly off of the cobblestoned streets of Lisbon. The music you’re making cannot be heard. You are melting. You are not god and you will never be. And your face looks like the melted blurs passing by in the tunnel of the blue line, frozen in time like the Syrian refugees fleeing to Munich looking dazed and immersed inside of a peaceful surrender.
There is a broken woman inside of some rainy Portuguese windows. Her face is crackling and crumbling like the chipped buildings that line the streets. When everyone leaves the room, she stomps so hard she shakes the floor. Her mouth is sliding down the left side of her face, headed for the floor. And she thinks angrily about his five-year-old daughter that hit her last week, feeling that empty, cold, pitiful abyss of rejection. Because he’ll pay her face back to Chicago and bury the thought of her in his backyard. The chapter in the daughter’s young life will become an obsolete, foggy window while the woman’s veins cake with clay and she is already a bit more galvanized than she used to be. Screaming to anyone with ears, strangling the air inside of the room. No one can see how I hurt, she thinks, no one understands. But she bathes in her despair until the water turns frigid.
In Lisbon there is a woman knitting in the water closet. In Lisbon, there is a Greek woman lying unconscious on the sidewalk without a friend or enemy in sight, and she is passed by many on their way to sit on broken benches.
This city is crumbling. We are crumbling beautifully and disjointedly. This is the land of integration: exciting, arousing integration. Lisbon will bring you what you want if only you hold your head under her salty, contaminated waters for as long as your can.