This year, I am experiencing my father’s birthday twice, simultaneously. My body is telling me that it is 1am in the morning, but I have also just sloughed into the Lisbon airport, where all the flight information displays fast-forward me to a disorienting 9am. I am supposed to present my research at a fancy academic conference in a few days, but I can’t escape that today is today: more so than in past years, I feel like a cassette tape skipping tracks, thin film demagnetized, chasing after semblances of continuity. Time is a spiral and I am unspooling, confluent with the worn edges of memory.

There is a version of this story where grief didn’t pry suddenly into my diaphragm two nights ago, my checkered breaths casting bruises into dreamscapes. There is a version of this story where I didn’t wake up crying the next morning, gasping after a familiar shadow, (often) gone by daylight.

This is today’s re/telling: I am contending with my grief in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by unfamiliar people, steeped in an unfamiliar language. My watch battery is dead, and both nose pads of my glasses broke off while I was on the plane, and I had to buy a second travel adapter because the first one didn’t have the right plug shape for my laptop charger. These are all inconveniences that my father would’ve mitigated if he were here. I wonder if this is his version of a prank. Not very funny if so (but then again, these are petty spiritual maneuverings, perhaps, as in silly), but of course I am at/tending.

The sunlight outside is gray-tinged, slanting through the rain. The bleary day smudges into the airport, which comprises a dusty array of inconsistent staircases, escalators, and elevators, interspersed among the harried rush of the food establishments open at this hour. I wend my way to the fifth floor, where there is a quiet cafeteria without every other seat taken up by an exhausted and/or grumpy traveler and/or their luggage. The barista talks to me through the red-fading-to-pink streak that curls through his bangs.

“With milk, please,” I tell him, after he gives me a few options for my coffee (in English, after I fumble through some hasty web-translated Portuguese).

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