I Confess I Miss Portugal

Missing a land while living in it

Photo by Lina Bob on Unsplash

Here is a phrase that won’t make much sense if clearly said by someone living here, as I do. Even more contradictory is the fact that I lived away from here, far from my homeland, and felt less longing for my country than I do now.

But here it is: I miss my country, a land that appears strange before my eyes as time, history, and identity — like so many others — dissolve into a uniform, globalized mass.

I once thought, in my days of optimism, that such an evolution would be wonderful and beneficial, bringing distant peoples closer together and fostering understanding, cooperation, solidarity, and humanity.

Facing my enormous illusion now also means facing my colossal disillusionment. None of that happened — instead, the opposite has. What drew closer did not understand, made itself understood, or wanted to understand.

And once, those we thought of as near yet distant left their promising lands to come to others but closed themselves off in small communities. They don’t care at all about “the locals”.

My country has become a social experiment in all of this. If asked to define what Portugal is today, I would describe a land adrift in a sea, now on the verge of drowning under giant waves, dying like any other lost…