Planning a dream vacation is difficult when you're overwhelmed by the weight of old memories and everyday stress. Learning how to break down your itinerary into simple goals will help you move from dreaming to departing.
She found the magazine page in the back of the utility drawer, folded twice and soft at the creases, the terraced vineyards gone yellow where the ink had bled. The cork was on the windowsill behind the aloe plant, which had grown around it slightly, one pale root touching the label. The Post-it was stuck to the inside cover of a library book she'd never returned - the hotel name written in the handwriting she used before she switched pens, the loopy one, the one from before.
The Notes document had forty-one lines by Thursday, then sixty-two by Sunday, and at some point she'd added a column called "contingency" and another one - below it, called "contingency for the contingency. " She printed the Alfama guesthouse page and taped it to the cabinet above the coffee maker, next to the expired coupon for the dry cleaner, and every morning she read the line about the blue tiles in the courtyard while the pot finished. The highlighter she used for the ferry times ran dry on the Setúbal schedule, and she rummaged for another one and couldn't find it - and she sat there with the dead pen in her hand and the paper in her lap for longer than she would have admitted to anyone.
The flight was $1,340 and she found it at 11:47 on a Tuesday with a half-eaten sleeve of crackers on the desk beside her. She held the cursor over the button for long enough that the screen dimmed. When she clicked it the confirmation number came back as a string of letters and digits she would never memorize, and she wrote it on the back of the Alfama printout anyway, in the margin below the blue tiles, in the handwriting she used now.
She folded the atlas closed along the old crease - the one that had gone white from being opened to the same page so many times, and set it on the shelf between the good dictionary and the thing about Lisbon she'd read twice without finishing. The cork was lighter than she remembered. She turned it over: one word, in green ink that had faded to the color of old mint, the name of a quinta she'd never been to. She set it back on the windowsill, in the ring it had pressed into the paint over the years - and the aloe didn't move.
She'd used the same magnet for years, a flat square of dark green with a Tuscan word on it she'd looked up once and forgotten. The confirmation printout was bright white against the fridge door, the ink still sharp, the confirmation number running along the bottom in a font the size of a legal disclaimer. She smoothed the magazine page beside it - the crease split one vineyard cleanly down the middle now, and the yellow was worse at the edges than she'd realized. She stood there with the refrigerator humming against her hip and looked at the two pieces of paper and then went to make coffee - and left them both.
She called Dora that night and Dora asked for the dates and she said them out loud - October ninth, October seventeenth - and then neither of them said anything for a second, and Renata looked at the confirmation printout on the fridge and the font was still the size of a legal disclaimer. She told Dora about the blue tiles and Dora said it sounded beautiful and Renata said yes, and then she opened the atlas to the dog-eared page and smoothed it flat on the counter while they talked, her palm pressing down on the crease that had gone white. After they hung up she closed it again without looking at it. She put the atlas back on the shelf and stood there with her hand still on the spine.
She pulled the dead highlighter out from under the Setúbal schedule and set it on the windowsill next to the cork - the two of them together now, and she didn't throw either one away. The green folder was in the second drawer, under the warranty card for a blender she no longer owned, and she opened it once and looked at the confirmation printout inside and closed it again. That night she dreamed about the ferry and woke up at four and lay there in the dark with her hand flat on the mattress, and the room was completely quiet.
She found the phrasebook at the library sale - a dollar in the box with the water-damaged cookbooks, and brought it home and read the first thirty pages in the bath until the pages went soft at the bottom corner from the steam. She folded down the page for *obrigada* and the page for *faz favor* and the page with the verb *ficar*, which meant to stay or to remain or to be left behind, depending. In the morning the phrasebook was on the nightstand and she picked it up and held it without opening it and then put it in the green folder, in the dark - behind the confirmation printout.
She took the atlas off the shelf two weeks before departure and sat with it open on the kitchen table, tracing the coastline with her thumbnail, pressing hard enough to leave a white dent in the paper that faded before she lifted her finger. The pen she'd used to circle Setúbal had bled through to the other side, a small blue ghost on the reverse, and she turned the page and looked at it for a while. She closed the atlas and put it in the green folder with the phrasebook and the confirmation printout - and the folder was too thin for all three, and she had to press it shut with both hands. The shelf where the atlas had been had a pale rectangle in the dust, the exact size of the thing that was no longer there.
