Field Note — On Returning

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Armona is a small island off the Algarve coast. No cars. Maybe 50 all year round residents. Pine trees, dunes, the Atlantic doing what it always does.

I have been here before. During Covid — five, six months — when the world closed down and this place became the kind of stillness that was hard to find anywhere else.

I came back in late Noember 2025. And stayed for a bit more than five months.

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This time, I came with work. A manuscript to edit. Plenty of submissions to write for my memoir The Nomad — so many different ways of saying: this book matters, here is why, please look. The kind of work that asks you to be precise and hopeful at the same time. Not always easy to hold both.

I left three times for a short period. Three friends came to visit — one by one, at different moments. The rest of the time, it was just the island and me.

And the weather, which was not always kind.

There were weeks when the wind and rain came in hard and the ferry schedule became the only rhythm left. You cannot manufacture activity on Armona. You can only wait, or walk, or sit with whatever is already there.

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There is a German word — Besinnung — that does not translate cleanly. It means something like: coming back to your senses. Coming back to yourself. Not meditation. Not rest, exactly. More like — clearing enough space to hear what is actually there.

Five months on a small island will do that, whether you invite it or not.

The editing taught me things about the book I could not have seen while writing it. The submissions taught me something about how we ask for things — and what we believe, underneath the asking. The solitude taught me, again, what I seem to need to keep relearning: that sitting still with difficult things is not the same as avoiding them. It might, in fact, be the only way through.

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I first came to Armona during Covid because the world outside had stopped making sense. I came back now for different reasons — but perhaps not entirely different ones.

There are things I needed to prepare for. Not plan. Not solve. Just — prepare.

My father is ninety-one. He is dying. Not quickly, not gracefully — but certainly. I have written about him elsewhere, about what we were to each other and what we were not. About the peace we eventually found — not warmth, exactly, but the absence of resistance. Two people who had stopped needing the other to be different.

What I did not expect was to say goodbye to him here. On this island. Before I had even boarded the ferry.

Not in a phone call. Not in a letter. In the quiet of five months of preparation that happened without my quite noticing it. The long evenings when the ferry had stopped running and the pine trees were moving in the dark and something in me was — settling. Getting ready. Not for his death, exactly. For what comes after. The fact that I will be next in line. The question of what remains.

It is a strange thing, to grieve someone who is still alive. Stranger still to discover that the grieving is already done. Not coldly. Completely.

I leave tomorrow for Germany. I will see him. I will be present. I will not need it to be different from what it is.

But the goodbye — the real one — happened here, somewhere between the editing and the wind and the weeks of sitting still.

I did not plan that either. Armona, it turns out, has its own ideas about what work needs to be done.

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And so I leave the island with a finished manuscript, seventy letters sent into the world, and something else I cannot quite name — lighter, maybe, or simply more ready.

You take what the place gives you. And then you go.