From above, the clouds are a series of slow-motion detonations—billowing  eruptions turning and rolling in the wake of the plane, unrestrained and untamed all the way to Porto. They pile up like narcotized continents, cotton-wool candy dozing on the horizon, their edges singed gold by the hidden sun. 

Beside me sits a seventy-eight-year-old man, a retired civil servant who once worked at the Scottish Office in Edinburgh. A lifetime of paperwork condensed into a pair of hands folded neatly in his lap. We exchange the basic data—names, destinations—but never the real reason who we are and why we're travelling.  A polite void suspended between us, a shared understanding that any explanation is overrated. Life, I’m thinking, is mostly a backlog of missed turns and deferred impulses. Indifference descends like an agent, dulling the mind into a functionless, thoughtless calm. Hours become decades.

The journey is clinically efficient. No drama, no omens. A taxi delivers us straight to the Ibis Budget in Gaia, west of Porto—a holding pen rather than a destination. The room is small, clean, aggressively adequate. Everything works. Nothing invites you to stay longer than necessary.

Down the road, beer and pizza come cheap.  Outside the air buzzes with cicadas. The heat hangs thick and immobile, pressing against the skin. The air is heavy with spice and oil drifting on the sidewalk, wafting from the kitchens, an intoxicating reminder that other lives are unfolding loudly, messily, while I sit here quietly cataloguing my own.

Tomorrow paces slowly towards the last syllable of recorded  time.

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