Lisbon gave me a strange feeling.

Home.

Not the kind of home you can point to on a map and say, I lived there once. I had never lived in Lisbon. I had never grown up on its streets or learnt its rhythms as a child. And yet there was something about being there that felt strangely familiar, as though I had arrived somewhere my life had already introduced me to long before I physically got there.

Perhaps that is what happens when a place exists inside a family.

Lisbon was connected to family, to family friends, to stories and memories that belonged to people I loved. I wasn’t simply travelling through a foreign city. I was travelling through fragments of other people’s histories. Places where members of my family had spent their childhoods, places they had known before I existed, streets and landscapes that had become part of the stories carried forward into my own life. There was something profoundly moving about standing somewhere that had been ordinary to them and realising that, for me, it had become a journey.

Travel is usually imagined as leaving home.

Lisbon made me think about travelling backwards into it.

There is a particular kind of intimacy in seeing the places where your family once belonged. You begin to imagine them younger. Before the photographs you know. Before the lives you know. Before they became the people who would eventually become part of your own story. A place can hold a version of someone that you never personally met. Walking through it, you borrow their eyes for a moment and wonder what they saw.

And Lisbon itself seemed to encourage that kind of slowing down.

There was no desperate need to conquer the city. It invited a different pace. The kind of travelling where you sit a little longer, eat a little slower, notice the light, listen to conversations around you, allow an afternoon to become an afternoon rather than turning it into another item on an itinerary. My nervous system seemed to understand something before I consciously did: I didn’t need to rush.

There was something restorative about that.

We spend so much of modern life moving at a speed that the body never quite agreed to. Notifications arrive before thoughts have finished forming. Screens ask for attention constantly. There is always another destination, another task, another thing to consume. But Lisbon offered moments where nothing needed to happen immediately. You could simply be there.

And those became the moments I treasured most, the ones I sometimes long for on a tiring day.

The food.

The conversations.

The feeling of being surrounded by people connected to my family.

The strange familiarity of somewhere I had never lived.

The little moments that would have been almost impossible to explain to anyone who wasn’t there.

And then there were the wonderfully unexpected ones.

I got kissed by a sea lion.

I held macaws.

I ate very, very good food.

These are not particularly philosophical experiences when you write them down, but perhaps that is exactly why I remember them. Travel has a habit of producing moments that would sound completely improbable if removed from their context. One minute you are thinking about family history and the passage of generations; the next, a sea lion is kissing you.

Life is allowed to be that strange, trust me.

I also remember seeing a cruise ship pass by.

At the time, something about it struck me. The enormous ship moving through the water represented a kind of travel that felt completely beyond my reach. I could look at it, imagine what it must be like inside, wonder about the people on board, but going on one myself belonged to some distant category of possibility.

I couldn’t have known then that, about a decade later, I would be on one (thank you Royal Caribbean!).

That memory has stayed with me because of how quietly it happened. There was no dramatic declaration that I would one day become a cruise traveller. I simply saw the ship. I noticed the desire. Life moved on.

And then, years later, I was standing on one.

Perhaps that is one of the stranger things about our relationship with possibility. We are often very poor at predicting which things in our present will become ordinary parts of our future. Something can look impossibly distant until, one day, you are standing inside it wondering why it ever seemed so far away.

Even my relationship with television somehow became connected to that experience of being abroad. My decade love of the TV show Bones came from that trip too. Like many others who discovered the show while abroad, it was one of the few things I could understand in English. Bones became one of the first television shows I watched religiously, and I loved its characters so much that, looking back, they probably shaped parts of me in ways I never consciously realised. It is strange how these things happen. You can be far from home, watching something because it is one of the few familiar things available to you, and years later realise that it has become part of the architecture of who you are.

Lisbon gave me another kind of reminder about that.

Home doesn’t always mean the place you were born.

Sometimes it is a place you inherit through stories. Sometimes it is somewhere your family once belonged. Sometimes it is somewhere that makes your body relax before your mind has figured out why.

And sometimes home is simply a feeling you recognise when you encounter it somewhere you have never lived.

I think that is what I treasured most about Lisbon.

I wasn’t returning to a home.

I was discovering one.

A home I had never lived in, but somehow already knew.