We weren’t going out.
We’d agreed—just bread, olives, early night. Kevin had even taken his shoes off.
Then the music started. Somewhere down the street.
A sound like smoke curling out of a wound.
Kevin stood up without a word, one sock on, one off. I followed.
No plan. Just sound.
We walked through alleyways that felt like they were built out of sighs and peeling paint. Past men selling chestnuts from metal drums. Past three teenagers who laughed too loudly and then vanished like smoke.
The music led us to a door we wouldn’t have noticed if it hadn’t been slightly open and spilling light like it didn’t mean to.
Inside: a bar made out of shadows and regret.
Tiles cracked like spiderwebs. A fan turning slowly but achieving nothing. Four tables, maybe five. One of them had a candle in a wine bottle. One of them had a sleeping dog on someone’s lap.
“Sit,” a woman said, not asking.
We did.
Kevin ordered what the man next to him was having. It came in a ceramic cup and tasted like honey, rust, and something that might have once been aniseed.
Then the music started again.
Fado.
Not the tourist kind. This wasn’t a show. This was someone bleeding in public with a guitar.
An older man with a voice made of gravel. A woman next to him who looked like she hadn’t blinked in three decades. He sang like he was remembering something he shouldn’t. She stared into the dark like the dark was staring back.
Kevin didn’t speak.
I didn’t breathe.
At some point, someone brought us bread without asking. The dog opened one eye. The bartender nodded at no one.
The song ended.
No applause. Just silence that held the weight of it.
A man at the next table leaned in. “Fado isn’t sad,” he said. “It’s longing. For something you don’t have. Or had. Or maybe never existed.”
Kevin nodded like he understood. He didn’t.
But neither did I.
And that was the point.
We left when the songs stopped. The woman at the door handed me a fig and said, “For sweetness. You need it after.”
We got lost on the way back. Porto at night is a different thing. The streets tilt in directions that feel invented. Kevin pointed at a tiled mural and whispered, “That’s the river.”
It wasn’t.
When we found the van again, there was fog on the windscreen and someone had stuck a dried flower in the wiper.
We sat on the steps outside. Split the fig. Didn’t say much.
Somewhere, a church bell rang thirteen times.
The city didn’t care.
And neither did we.
