The years before a move look, from the outside, like the years before any other ordinary life.
There were four years between the first time we came to Portugal together and the day the removal van arrived at the house in Scotland. Four years of ordinary weeks, in a country we already knew was not going to be our final one, doing the things that a family with two small children does when nothing dramatic is happening. The school run. The grocery shop. The routine of a week that gathers, quietly, into a year.
From the outside, nothing was happening. From the inside, Portugal was in every conversation.
It was not always the word itself. Sometimes it was a look between us in the kitchen when a photograph came up on someone's phone. Sometimes it was a quiet remark, in the evening, about the weather in a village neither of us had been to yet. Sometimes it was the way one of us would say the word without saying it, and the other would understand exactly what had been meant.
It did not go anywhere. That was the strange thing. Other feelings pass. This one settled deeper into every ordinary week and would not soften. Every time we came back from a trip to Portugal, in the motorhome years and the years before, the feeling came home with us. It sat in the small hours. It came up in the middle of Wednesdays. It was still there in the morning, waiting.
We tried to keep it connected to something real. We looked at land. We looked at houses. My husband went back on his own, more than once, to walk on pieces of land in person and see what they were actually like when you stood on them. The looking was not planning yet. It was slower than planning. It was the way you keep talking to someone across a distance so that when you finally see each other again, the conversation has not gone cold.
I think, honestly, we were both quietly aware of something we did not say out loud for a long time. If we kept waiting for the right time, the right time was not going to come. Ordinary life would keep gathering around us in the shape it was already in. The years would keep passing. And Portugal would stay a memory and a plan and never be a place we actually lived.
That is how it happens, I think, for most people who mean to move somewhere and never do. It is not that they forgot. It is that the ordinary life on top of the feeling kept happening, and the feeling stayed underneath, and one day they realised they had carried it for so long it had become part of the furniture.
We did not want to be those people.
The moment we understood that the right time was not a real thing was the moment everything began to move. Not because we had a plan. Because we had stopped waiting for one to arrive.