I went to Sintra to finish a story and spent most of the week looking at fog. It sat against the windows of the guesthouse like a polite but immovable visitor.
Every morning I cleaned my glasses, made coffee in a chipped blue mug and waited for the first sentence. It did not come. What came instead were notes: the smell of wet eucalyptus, the hush of the bus at the bottom of the hill, a woman selling queijadas who called everyone ‘my flower’.
Some weeks you write. Some weeks you only collect the weather.
The sentence, eventually
It arrived on the train home, somewhere after Queluz, and it was about the fog. Of course it was. The notes had been the story all along; I just needed distance to see it.
