Quarteira. The apartment is temporary and still smells of someone else's cooking. Outside, the evening light has reached an orange-purple generosity I had never known in Romania. The first thing I unpack is not the laptop or the shirts. It is the cup, still wrapped in a wool sweater, still carrying the cold of travel. I set it on the counter, and the last light catches the hand-painted flowers, blue-green as shallow seawater. My grandfather crossed the Dniester with this cup in a rucksack and died without seeing Portugal. For one minute, in that kitchen, he arrives before I do.
Andrei Romanov is a Romanian-born writer based in Portugal. Author of Masters of the Ocean Sea, winner of the London Book Festival Award for General Nonfiction. amazon.com/author/andreiromanov Instagram: @andreiromanovauthor