The Places We Inhabit, Inhabit Us
On memory, place, and the invisible marks we leave behind.
I believe that the story of our lives is told through the places we have inhabited. As I reflect on the places I have lived, uncomfortable answers poke at me, reminding me of how Sophie my dog keeps poking me when I neglect giving her my attention.
My friends and visitors come to Portugal, looking for a new place to call home. They arrive carrying their own histories, their own collection of places left behind. I watch them move through my adopted country and wonder what they see, what they feel, whether this might become their next chapter or simply another stop along the way.
It makes me think about all the places I have called home and how I left vestiges of who I am scattered across landscapes and living rooms. A garden of peonies blooming long after I moved away. A Christmas tree planted with ceremony and hope. A fountain for birds that still catches morning light. A small shed to house garden tools, standing sentinel over someone else's dreams now. These physical remnants are the easier ones to catalog.
The other kinds of memories I left behind run deeper—relationships and friendships created in kitchen conversations and late-night revelations, experiences shared over mundane Tuesday dinners that somehow became sacred, lives birthed and lives lost within walls that held our grief and joy with equal tenderness. Weddings where we danced until our feet ached, funerals where we learned that love doesn't end when someone leaves, divorces that brought us to our knees, graduations that marked not just achievements but the passage of time itself.
When I moved, I gave away or threw away things which held memories of the places I loved in, grew in, struggled in, and ultimately decided to leave. Each discarded item carries weight—not just physical, but emotional. The coffee mug that witnessed a thousand morning rituals. The throw pillow that absorbed tears during a difficult season. The books whose margins hold conversations with my former selves.
I experience what the Portuguese call "saudade"—a longing for something ineffable, a past we don't quite remember, a nostalgia for a life we perceived as clothed in delight. Images appear in my mind of sharing my life with a two-year-old who is now a grown man that I see only rarely. A home in Severna Park on the property of a private school where I experienced a sense of community and safety. Visions of a happy family at Christmas, sharing the food we had all cooked and gleefully opening presents between bits of pastries, empanadas and wine while my mother smiled in delight and my father playfully threw wrapping at us. A property on a hill overlooking the Pacific in Ecuador whose dreams were never realized.
How do we inhabit the places of our life?
Are we present to our lives as they happened in that moment, or do our memories bring alive that which we missed while we were there?
How did we arrive—fearful or in anticipation of new adventures? Did we depart in sadness, or did our longing make us jump into the unknown future courageously and joyfully?
What about now?
I find myself holding the past as a treasured moment to be taken out on occasion, lovingly held as the stories it contains wash over me. Then I put it back into the boxes lined with velvet with care and step into my current life to create more timeless experiences—until at last the hourglass runs out, leaving the treasure box for someone else to care for or discard.
But perhaps that's the point.
The places we inhabit do indeed inhabit us, becoming part of our internal landscape long after we've locked the door for the last time. They live in the way we arrange furniture, the rituals we carry forward, the people we choose to love, the gardens we plant wherever we land next.
And maybe, just maybe, we inhabit them too—leaving invisible marks that future residents will somehow sense, adding our layer to the palimpsest of human habitation that makes every place sacred in its own quiet way.
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