Summer? Diabolical.

If life were a novel, this past summer would have been penned by a particularly cruel 19th-century author with a penchant for long-winded suffering and tragic heroines who sigh a lot by candlelight.

If my life was to be compared to a play, it would be a Greek tragedy, with a lot of wailing, some divine smiting, and a chorus of people shaking their heads in synchronized dismay.
And yet, here I am, still standing. (Well, sitting. And dramatically sipping tea.)

Let’s recap, shall we?

My dad died, and my boyfriend (or should I say "ex" now?) left me with three hours’ notice, catching the first flight to New York like a man in a particularly avant-garde breakup performance piece. He called it an act of desperation; I prefer calling it the second-most emotionally violent thing to happen that week.

There is a certain comedy in absurdity, and if this summer has given me anything, it’s a sharp appreciation for life’s completely deranged sense of humor. The universe, I suspect, is run by a team of drunk screenwriters who keep throwing in plot twists just to see if I’ll crack.

The thing about loss is that it comes in layers. The first is shock. The second is the logistical nightmare (bureaucracy, funeral arrangements, answering text messages that say let me know if you need anything! with a deadpan do you do tax paperwork?). The third layer, the fun one, is the quiet grief—the kind that shows up uninvited when you're picking out fruit at the market or trying to decide if you still like the songs that once made you think of someone.

And yet—there is still life to be lived. Lisbon, golden and indifferent, carried on. People still drank espressos on terraces, seagulls still screamed like banshees over the Tagus, and the world did not pause for my grief. So, I did what any self-respecting tragic heroine would do: I got up. I got dressed. I went out into the city and let the absurdity of life hold me up when nothing else did.

Somewhere between all of this, I also re-embraced the violin (because why not lean fully into the brooding artist aesthetic?), flirted with the idea of fado (Lisbon’s most heartbreakingly perfect soundtrack), and threw myself into work with the kind of focus only the emotionally unhinged can muster. Because if life insists on being an unpredictable mess, I might as well curate my own chaos.

So here I am. Not quite whole, not quite broken. Wiser, warier, and perhaps a little funnier in that dark, been through some things way. If this summer was a test, I don’t know if I passed, but I do know I survived it.

And that, for now, will have to be enough.