When my phone was pickpocketed on the streets of Lisbon a week and a half into my European trip, I was only vaguely alarmed.
I would not consider myself a chronically online person. I don’t photograph every meal I eat – just the dishes with particularly chic lighting with trendy colour palettes: moody anchovies, natural wine, etc.
This was not the first time I had lost my phone. It wasn’t even the first time I had lost my phone while travelling overseas. I moved on and bought a beer, continued my evening and resolved to deal with it in the morning.
In the morning, I watched on my iPad as my phone travelled slowly north of Lisbon through towns in the north of Portugal. I realised, with a start that I no longer had GPS services to ferry me comfortably to cafes with the best pastéis de nata (Portuguese tarts) for breakfast. I couldn’t even check the Google reviews for a venue before I entered it.
Walking through the streets of Lisbon, my pockets empty but for a handful of euros, I passed interesting doors and murals and had no means to photograph them for my Instagram story. So this was how people travelled before the internet, I thought: they just wandered around aimlessly, looking at things.
The same day, I was due to travel to Cascais – a beachside town a half hour out of Lisbon – with my family, who were (naturally) completely distrustful of my capacity to take care of myself as a fully functioning adult.
“She’s alive,” my mother commented drily as their taxi pulled up to my accommodation.
Pulling into our next stop in Cascais, I looked wistfully at the vines creeping over the exterior walls of our quaint B&B. I thought about how I would compose a picture for Instagram, paired perfectly with an adjoining closeup of the flowers growing outside.
In the days that followed, I read four books and lost all concept of what was going on in the news.
I had no idea what the big joke was on Twitter that day, or how the acquaintances I followed on social media were enjoying their concurrent European holidays, or the fact someone I met in a bar in Berlin once had gotten engaged.
I went on long walks and sat in cafes and thought, for the first time in a long time, without distraction. I wrote in my diary again.
Sitting at the beach one day, I watched local teenagers jump into the freezing water off the jetty. A girl and a boy teased each other, wrestling their bodies towards the edge until the girl fell in, shrieking with laughter. Boys summersaulted in backwards, emerging exultant, limbs dripping in sweat and seawater.
Next to me, a boyfriend took photograph after photograph of his bikini-clad girlfriend in various sexy poses: looking towards the camera, looking away from the camera, looking at the ocean, slight pout, hand on hip, hand touching hair.
I thought of how I would have curated this stage of the holiday for my followers: a beach shot, the vines at the B&B, the buskers in the town square at sunset, a page from my book.
On my last night in Portugal we stumbled on a gathering of people in a sidestreet in Lisbon. A busker sat in the middle of them, playing local folk songs on his guitar.
The crowd sang along, swaying in unison. Strangers shimmied into the centre of the circle and grabbed hold of each other, slow danced around him.
I wished I could’ve filmed it, this perfect end to a perfect evening, this moment in time we all shared, a group who had never met, who may never cross paths again. But it wouldn’t have been the same. It never is.
