The Trip We Didn't Take

My husband and I were supposed to be in Portugal this week. Our friends were getting married, we had the tickets booked, and then his new job made it impossible to go. I have a lot of feelings about that (which I will not fully get into here), but I will say: it's been an emotional week.

I'm also in my luteal phase, which is doing absolutely nothing to help.

The harder part is that most of the people on that trip are in our lives because of Lisa, our friend who died almost six years ago at 31. She loved to travel more than anyone I've ever known. Going would have been bittersweet in the specific way only grief can pull off: the thing that hurts and feels right at exactly the same time.

Instead, we went upstate for the weekend, which, genuinely, was not bad. We ate well, hiked, drank good wine, and wandered into a little bookstore bar called The Spotty Dog, where I picked up a compilation of Joan Didion's writing and spent a very peaceful hour just reading.

But then this week arrived — wedding photos on my phone, answering emails I can barely focus on, full awareness that I am not in Portugal — and I keep coming back to the same thing: we should have gone. There will always be another conflict with the job. There won't always be that group of people, in that place, for that reason.

Didion said: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." I think I already knew. I just needed to write it down.