The Space Between the Days

Reflections on Leaving, Belonging, and Finding My Way Forward.

Still moving forward, even when the way isn’t entirely clear.

Dear Readers,

Feliz Ano Novo (Happy New Year) to you.

I wasn’t going to share this, but over the holidays I took a brief pause away from writing, to sit with life for a moment and to reconnect with the quieter things that compel me to put words on the page. This is my first post of 2026.

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There is a particular stretch of time each year that feels suspended, as if the calendar loosens its grip. The days between Christmas, New Year’s, and my birthday don’t fully belong to what’s ending or what’s about to begin. They exist in between: quiet, unanchored, and heavy in ways that are difficult to name.

I’ve come to think of this as my three weeks of melancholy. Different weeks, the same narrow span of days, and every year, the same emotional weight. It’s a time when reflection arrives uninvited, when the noise of celebration fades and something softer, more persistent takes its place.

My parents told me my birth was expected at the end of December, but as usual, I arrived late. My timing in life has never been impeccable. I always seem to be slightly ahead of or behind the moment. And a birthday that falls immediately after the holidays has never quite felt like a real birthday to me. By then, the rituals are spent, the table cleared, and the calendar already moving on.

Each year, Paul asks what I want to do to celebrate my birthday, and my answer is always the same: nothing much. By that point, I’ve already been out to lunch or dinner more times than usual, eaten far more than I normally would, and had plenty of cake - lots of cake. When my birthday arrives, I’m full, tired, reflective, and a few pounds heavier. Emotionally and physically, I’m simply done.

Okay. Enough about that.

The truth is, I don’t really know why these particular days carry such weight for me. But I’ve learned I’m not alone. Reading the reflections of others who struggle quietly during the holidays reminds me that this in-between space between celebration and routine, between endings and beginnings can be difficult for many of us.

For me, the holiday season is a time of reflection and sometimes I reflect on all the wrong things. I dwell on parts of the past I can’t change and worry about a future I might somehow get wrong.

Long ago, I escaped from the “Holiday Spirit” box. You know the one. The one that insists I should be merry and bright. That I should go into debt buying presents for relatives I barely know. That the holidays are somehow “magical,” and if I’m not feeling it, the problem must be me.

Instead, for many years now, Paul and I have taken the quieter route: sharing a meal either together or with friends, listening to soothing, instrumental holiday music, taking a walk, enjoying a glass of wine, or watching the rain fall, and feeling deeply grateful that we have warmth, food, and love, especially when so many others do not, through no fault of their own.

And perhaps this, too, is part of the melancholy.

It’s hard to fully lean into celebration when the world feels so heavy. There is so much sadness, so much anger, so much conflict unfolding all around us. So much unnecessary loss, displacement, and suffering, much of it relentless, much of it impossible to ignore. Holding joy alongside that awareness can feel complicated and sometimes even disorienting. Sometimes it feels easier to step quietly to the side and simply notice.

So, I think about life.

About the people who have come and gone. Those who have passed away, those who remain in touch, those who drifted away, those who now live with dementia and no longer remember me, and those I knew only briefly as our lives crossed paths for a moment in time.

I think about the choices I’ve made. The good ones (like marrying Paul) and the not-so-good ones (I’ll spare you the details). I think about the world itself: its madness, its suffering, its uncertainty, the excess and entitlement of some, and the most basic unmet needs of others. I wonder where I fit into all of this: why I’m still here and not there (wherever “there” is).

The space between these days often opens into other in-between places: the spaces between who we were, who we are, and who we are still becoming.

Maybe it’s because of my birthday (the second one in this new and advanced decade) that these in-between days open the door to familiar questions. Not dramatic ones. Quieter questions. The kind that surfaces when time slows and there’s room to notice what no longer fits.

I sometimes reflect on why I didn’t stay in Rhode Island my entire life, like so many people I know there. And if some left, it was usually a move to Florida. So why wasn’t Florida an option for me? Why did I keep feeling as though something was unfinished?

Looking back now, I see that period less as a desire to leave and more as a growing awareness that our lives had become too tightly contained. Paul and I had built something solid - family, friends, work - but over time it began to feel worn thin. Not broken. Just narrow.

We were often the steady ones that others leaned on, the people everyone assumed would always be there. Life was full and familiar, but increasingly predictable. Days blurred together. We weren’t unhappy so much as restless, moving through routines on autopilot, sensing that there might be more space to inhabit than the lives we had carefully assembled.

We tried different versions of “normal.” We worked. We owned a home. We ran a business. We took vacations. We stayed busy. On paper, everything made sense. But underneath it all was a quiet sense of postponement as if something essential was waiting to be named.

When we moved west to Arizona it wasn’t about leaving people behind as much as it was about giving ourselves room to breathe. Room to step outside what was expected and see what might happen if we allowed life to widen a little.

Arizona felt like an opening. A new horizon filled with energy and possibility. Moving there felt right in that gut-deep way that doesn’t require logic, only trust.

But distance, as it turns out, changes things.

The farther away we moved, the more our former lives and the people in them drifted. At first, everyone tried to stay in touch. Then the visits slowed. Calls became less frequent. Emails and holiday cards faded. Sometimes we learned about major life events only well after the fact.

“Out of sight, out of mind,” it turns out, is very real.

I know now that some people were hurt by our leaving. To protect themselves, they let us go. I understand that. I’ve done the same in my own way.

During these three weeks of melancholy, I thought about our move abroad in 2021 and realized that many of the same hopes, fears, hurts, and moments of joy remain. But this time, the understanding feels different.

What I see now is not an escape or a pursuit, but a gradual turning toward a life that feels more honest.

Living in Portugal has opened my eyes, not because it offers certainty, but because it has taught me to sit more comfortably with questions. It has made me more aware of the beauty in differences of opinion, of the people we meet, and in the unexpected connections formed along the way. It has been a life lesson and a true gift.

And that is what I’m holding onto.

Not the certainty that everything will be easy, or even clear, but the understanding that this life, imperfect and unpredictable as it is, still feels honest to us.

Even when the world feels tumultuous and frightening, I believe Paul and I are exactly where we are meant to be, for now. Still moving forward. Still learning. And still finding our way, safely, together.

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Thanks for being on this journey with me.

Thank you for reading Our Portugal Journey. This publication is free and open to everyone, and it exists thanks to the support of readers like you. If you’d like to receive new posts and help keep this work independent - and help support the research, time and travel that goes into it - you’re warmly invited to become a free or paid subscriber.

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Until next time…

Obrigada!

Carol.