With Love in Lisbon

I will never know your life and you will never know mine. And there’s a certain sort of tragedy in that. 

We all have our stories, every single one of us. Stories of drunken nights and quiet mornings, of love lost and love found, stories that bring tears to our eyes if we ever attempt to tell them and stories that only we find funny.

Our lives are a string of stories, in a way. We’re all walking unbound books with thousands upon thousands of untouched pages still left to fill up.

This is probably why the idea of strangers has always bothered me. I’ve always loved a good story and there seems to me to be an unfairness of sorts, a kind of aggravation, that I can’t possibly know every single one of them.

And it is this aggravation, this desire, this itching to know all these lives, that made me so fascinated with the love locks in Rossio Square in Lisbon, Portugal.

Because each and every one of those metal hearts etched with Sharpie in handwriting of all shapes and sizes, in all different languages and dialects, is a story on its own. Each lock is a glimpse into the mind of the person who wrote it. It is what mattered the most when they were asking themselves, “What piece of me is worth writing down and locking up?”

As an onlooker, these locks were not full stories. They were only snapshots, but they were stories nonetheless.

Here are some of the ones that I lucky enough to know, if only for a moment.

How wild it was to let it be! 2015

First time traveling alone

Miss you, Martin

∞ + 1

I  got breakfast at a cafe across the street from the love locks and as I was sitting, sipping my coffee, staring at all those locks with all those stories, I thought “What’s the purpose?” They don’t do it for recognition. No one will truly understand “∞ + 1” like the one who wrote it down understood it; I’ll never know who Martin was and what he truly meant to the person who felt so compelled to write his name down and leave it in a square in Lisbon, Portugal.

I think that people write love locks for different reasons: for themselves, for others, to commemorate something amazing, to leave something behind. But overall, it’s not for recognition, it’s not for understanding, it’s merely for the sake of existing.

And that’s a beautiful thing.

So I just want to leave you with one last story I found that morning in Lisbon.

I’ll never know what this song meant to the one who wrote it’s lyrics down, but I invite you to close your eyes for a moment and listen to the song at the end of this post. For two or three minutes just sit and enjoy.

“I’ve got you under my skin…” 11/02/15

And simply exist.