When Tomé was seven he noticed that his father sometimes went away without leaving. He would be at the dinner table or on the sofa or in the garden, and then a particular quietness would come over him — not unhappy, not present — a kind of weighted stillness, like a stone settled at the bottom of clear water. He was still there if you spoke to him. He came back immediately. But for a moment he had been somewhere else.
Tomé asked about this once, directly, in the way children ask direct questions about things that adults have learned to leave alone. He asked: "Where do you go?" His father looked at him with the expression of someone who hadn't expected to be seen. He said: "Portugal." They were in London. They had been in London for six years. Portugal was where his father had grown up, where his parents still were, where a version of his life that did not include this city and this house and this son still existed in some form, preserved in the memory of streets and smells and particular qualities of light in the late afternoon.
His father tried to explain. He said: "In Portuguese there is a word — saudade. It's not exactly sadness. It's not exactly missing. It's more like... the feeling of something that was true, that you are still carrying." He pressed his hand flat against his chest. "Here. You carry it here. It has weight." Tomé pressed his own hand against his chest, trying to feel if he carried anything there. He wasn't sure he did yet. He was seven.
He understood it twenty years later, living in a different country, going away without leaving in the middle of conversations, returning from somewhere he couldn't explain. He would be at his own table and the weight would settle in his chest — not the weight of sadness, not exactly, but the weight of everything that was true and was also somewhere else, Portugal and London and his father's face explaining saudade in a kitchen that no longer existed. He would come back. He always came back. But for a moment he carried everything.
He thought of his father. He thought: he tried to explain this to me and I didn't understand yet. I understand now. He pressed his hand against his chest and felt it there — specific, irreducible, real. The weight of a life that had happened, still happening, still him.
The weight in your chest is not grief. It is everything you have loved that continues to live inside you.
