(trigger warning: mentions of trauma, dissociation, drug use, fire) PORTUGAL I decided to portray the feelings of dissociation through a narrative based on my own experiences. In April of 2018, I moved to Portugal after a series of traumatic events in the UK. I had developed PTSD from the traumas and experienced strong bouts of dissociation. It felt like I was viewing my life from a third-person perspective. I felt as if my life was a moving car but I was in the back seat observing life go by the window. The place I moved to was off-grid in the Portuguese wilderness where the fig and olive trees provided a little shade from the arid sun. Where red dirt stretched for miles before it was interrupted by mountains sitting beneath the ever-blue sky. Somewhere in between all this, I was residing in an almost derelict lorry trailer. I arrived just in time for the end of the rainy season. I was living with a few other wanderers, never more than 5. We all had arrived there under very different circumstances, but we all shared an unwavering rejection of the life we left behind. Together we foraged and grew food. The land was borderline uninhabitable due to climate change, but we did our best to produce crops of courgettes, tomatoes and corn. We stole our bread from dumpsters outside the supermarket. When coated in olive oil and fried with garlic this stale bread became bakery-fresh again. Life was both tumultuous and banal. I was too mentally ill to be able to enjoy this time as if it were some kind of holiday. It felt more like emergency rehabilitation away from British society which I no longer felt able to assimilate into. All of this under that strange blue Portuguese sky. Looking at the sky during this time was a strange resolve. It was so vast and empty, away from the chaos of real life, which I barely felt physically connected to anyway. Sometimes I’d go days without seeing a single person. But in the sky, I was comforted, no matter what it would always be there. *** AGAVE Months passed. I saw the seasons change. In Portugal there’s just the wet season then the dry season. I became familiar with the plants and even began to relate to them. I was plagued by a desire to start over fresh, like a seed from a plant. I wanted to be detached from the version of me which carried my trauma. The days were long and lonely. Wild dogs roamed the land and I befriended some of them. They’d walk with me along the dirt track back to my trailer. I learned to cook with simple ingredients. Learned to live without material possessions. There was not much to do here, not many people to talk to. The land has a presence, a personality. I wanted to learn about it. I asked people about the plants. I was particularly interested in the agave plants. The huge sprawling agaves demanded space. Their thick ‘leaves’ were barbed with sharp thorns. Life on the ground is treacherous after all. To remain vulnerable would be unwise. The plants spend 20 years growing and growing. Most of their leaves reached far taller than I could even on tiptoes, and I was mesmerised by their presence along the dirt roads. They seem so stoic and still, enduring the harshness of the seasons over and over. Their stillness is interrupted when they bloom. Overnight, a thick trunk-like stem shoots from the centre of the agave. Over the next few days the stem races towards the sky, growing up to 8m tall. You can see them dancing on the skyline. Their stems reached far higher than other Portuguese botany; the desertification of the land has left most trees unable to grow tall; the soil was too solid to grow stabilising roots into. But the agave plant was different. It found a way out of the inhabitable environment. This resilience does not come without a cost. “The agave plant is “monocarpic”; it can only bloom once.” my friend told me. Once that magnificent flower is dancing in the air, the entire plant immediately begins to rot and die. It finds a way to start again but has to kill what it was before. In my dream-like state, I looked to the agave for answers. I too had spent 20 years growing, I wanted to start again, to rot. At night time in my trailer, I stared up at the sky. There was a hole above my bed, I could have fixed it but I didn’t. I felt the breeze on my face and looked at the stars. *** EUCALYPTUS The rainy season ended. In the dry season, the air is unbearably hot. Parched, I would sip from bottled water that was warmed even in the shadiest corner of my trailer. During the daytime, there was nothing to do but wait for the evening to pull cooler air over you. People came and went. Hippies, criminals, and vagabonds, they all passed through. The ground got dustier, the long grass went dry. I began to engage in extremely reckless behaviour, regularly hitchhiking around both for fun and survival (the grocery store where I bought drinking water was miles away). I’d meet strangers and trust them too quickly, whilst simultaneously cutting ties with those back home who cared about me. I wanted nothing to do with my old life. I partied for days with punks and hippies in the mountain communes. Drank cheap wine instead of water. Went places I shouldn’t have. The heat continued to scold the land relentlessly. You could sweat through your shirt even during the night. Something seemed to be building up, the whole Algarve felt as if it might pop under the scorching pressure One night I was at a commune party in the mountains. This was a hippy party, where people danced to booming trance music through the day and night. Looking around you could see barefoot eccentrics sipping ‘ephedra’, a homemade natural alternative to speed. It looked like swamp water. Everyone was enjoying the music and the dip in temperature brought on by the night air. Because the commune was built on a mountain, the vagabonds living there had built precarious wooden platforms and pathways all over. Looking up from the bottom, you could see people dancing and drinking across many different levels, it looked like a strange fantasy scene. I danced with a Portuguese man, Tiago. We joked around and explored the party area of the commune. The commune folk had built vast structures which suspended gorgeous fabric artwork over the party. As we looked up to admire the artworks Tiago’s gaze turned cold. I asked him what was wrong but he wouldn’t tell me. He ran to get his other Portuguese friends and spoke to them with hasty secretiveness I was unable to keep up with. I pleaded with him to tell me what was happening but his friends shook their heads solemnly. The three of them began to walk up the mountain and Tiago gestured for me to come over. We walked a little slower than his friends, and with this space between us and the other men, he felt comfortable telling me why they were concerned. He pointed up. “Look at the colour of the sky.” It was different from the usual infinite spread of Prussian blue I was used to seeing at night here. Tonight it was like crushed charcoal swirled with something toxic. He looked at me sternly, “There’s a fire coming up the mountain.” My eyes widened, I cried out “We need to tell everyone! We need to get off the mountain!” Tiago shook his head. “This is why we didn’t want to tell you. You’re a foreigner, you don’t understand how the fires work here. If we tell everyone, they will panic like you. People will stampede down the mountain, they could die.” He explained that we needed to speak with the owner of the commune to make a plan. I walked with the men silently further up the mountain, passing hippies dancing in ecstasy to the pounding music. They were unaware of the smoke crawling in thicker and thicker above us. I dread to think what would happen to the people dancing on the wooden platforms on the mountain if the fire reached us. Finally, we found the commune owner. An older man, he looked distinguished even in his dirt-tinged attire. He was sat in a structure made of logs, peacefully reading away from the chaos of the party. The men calmly explained the situation in Portuguese, they pointed at the sky whilst the commune owner nodded, rubbing his chin. The commune owner’s reply was slow as if he was still calculating the risk to life as he spoke, “The fire came up this side of the mountain last year too. But it burned a line of trees between us and the fire. The fire can’t reach us, because the trees from last year already burned to nothing. Fire can’t pass through what already burned away.” The tension in the Portuguese men’s faces eased up. “Obrigado.” we said, before returning to the smoky dancefloor. There are fires every year in Portugal, big ones, that annihilate towns, forests, and lives. It’s from the eucalyptus tree. “The eucalyptus tree purposely sets itself on fire, it makes the seeds fertile. That’s why the leaves are so flammable.” a friend explained after I returned to my trailer the next day. “The trees grow close to each other, so it usually makes big lines of fire across the land. But oftentimes it catches on the dry grass and structures around it. It can spread quicker than people can control it.” He warned me the fire could easily reach us too. Last year his friend’s entire commune was burned to ash. “They spent years building it up. Now it’s gone.” That day we scythed the long grass down around our trailers, hoping to create enough clearance that the fire wouldn’t reach us if it came this way. We filled barrels with water from the well and put one next to each trailer. It was a long day's work, but when dusk came we looked out to the mountain a few miles out. We were dismayed to see a glowing orange line burning through the trees. The fire was getting closer. Night fell. We got word the fire had hit the town over. A woman had escaped the flames and came to us for safety. We gave her food and water, and she explained the fire had caught onto the houses. The town was up in flames. At one point they were surrounded and had to run to the old municipal pool. The townspeople climbed into the pool still wearing their clothes. Those who were able helped the children and elderly lower themselves in the water. For a moment the cool water gave them relief from the situation. But looking out to the street they saw the flames nearing. “We could feel the heat getting closer. We could see it destroying everything.” She told us the fire came so close that the flames came over the pool. They had to hold their heads underwater to stay safe. “Our eyelashes, they burned off.” Eventually, the fire changed path, and the townspeople could run to safety. The woman stayed with us for 2 days and 2 nights. All the while we watched the orange line on the mountain’s path twist and grow as the fire tore through more forest. “We just need to wait a little longer for rain” I would think to myself. Praying a change in weather could stop the fire from spreading. I couldn’t believe this destruction was due to a plant’s reproduction. How could so much devastation be due to a process of starting again? Just like the Agave plant, I began to obsess over Eucalyptus’ life cycle. I hoped that if understood it I could keep myself safer. The tree is relentless, all it yearns for is to start again as a seedling. It sacrifices itself and everything around it. I wondered if the sapling could remember the burn its old self felt. The dissociation was worse in these times of panic. I couldn’t believe what was happening was real. It had to be some sort of sick dream. Was I supposed to learn something from this? Was I supposed to burn my life away? I realised that perhaps I already had. When did I last speak to my family? I had burnt away my old life to start new, but this destruction was a perpetual loop. “Wait a little longer for the rain a little longer for the rain.” There was no way I could recover here. I will never forget the colour of smoke that fills the sky. It’s a deep grey that blocks the sunlight. But there’s something to the colour I cannot explain. It’s almost green almost yellow. When you see it you feel an instinctual dread. I am afraid of this colour. *** RAIN 2 weeks later, the sky split open into a storm. When I heard the first few fat raindrops fall onto my trailer I ran outside. By the time I was out the rain was coming down in sheets. The noise was tremendous, like a symphony. I couldn’t help but dance to it. I ran on the red dirt, the mud splattered up my legs and I screamed at the sky in joy. Life still felt like a dream I couldn’t get control of. I still felt like I was out of my body, afraid to come back in. But I really felt those raindrops on my skin that day. It pulled me back close enough that I knew I had to try to start again, try to get back to myself. I felt ready to try and face what had happened to me back in the UK. I booked a flight back to England. I still don’t feel connected to the person I was before. I changed everything about my life, my name, my identity. It all shifted. In many ways, I feel as if I am two separate people. Me before trauma and me after trauma. I know I still carry what happened to me in my body, but it is still to this day clouded by dissociation. I remember it in flashes before it is concealed by a strange detachment from the self. I felt guided by the agave and eucalyptus plants, I could understand my actions through them without judgement. I saw how starting again is intrinsically locked to some kind of destruction, whether it’s to others or yourself. This story is a weird one, but it’s my truth. I am telling it now through text and paintings because there are other people like me too. The other vagabonds, not just the ones on the communes. The ones in normal society too, wandering through their lives, trying to get back to themselves. Dissociation works in strange unexplainable ways. It reminds me of the smoke in the sky. You can’t see through it or explain it but there’s a natural feeling of dread to it. But smoke clears and rain comes. Things change and you keep moving forward when you are able to.