When you can be anywhere tomorrow, you can't promise anyone you'll be here next month.
Every woman I've dated in the last two years has said some version of the same thing. You're not hard to love. You're just impossible to plan around.
The last one said it on a Tuesday in Lisbon. We were walking along the river and she asked if I'd still be in the city in three months. I said probably not. She asked where I'd go. I said I didn't know yet. She stopped walking.
She wasn't angry. That was the worst part. She just looked tired. Like she'd already done the math and knew where this ended.
I designed my entire life so that no decision depends on anyone else. Where I go. When I wake up. Whether I stay or leave. Every single variable is mine. I thought that was the whole point.
The trap is you build a life perfectly shaped for one person and then wonder why no one else fits inside it.
When I ran my logistics company I was a terrible partner for different reasons. No time. No energy. Always on the phone. Always putting out a fire at the warehouse. I told myself that once I had the life I wanted, I'd finally be someone worth being with.
Turns out I just traded one kind of unavailable for another.
The old version was too busy. This version is too free. And too free sounds like a joke but it's not. When you can be anywhere tomorrow, you can't promise anyone you'll be here next month. When your whole life runs on never committing to a place or a plan, a relationship isn't just hard. It doesn't fit anywhere in what you've built.
You know this. Maybe you moved to a new city for the third time and realized you keep leaving right before anything gets real. Maybe someone you actually liked asked you to plan a trip six months out and you felt your throat tighten and couldn't explain why. Maybe you've been telling yourself you're just not ready. When the truth is your life doesn't have a slot for another person in it and you made it that way on purpose.
The woman in Lisbon had a job. A lease. Friends she'd had for years. A Sunday routine with people who expected her to show up. A cafe where the barista started her order when she walked through the door. She had roots. Roots need something to grow next to.
I had a backpack and three income streams and a flight to Mexico City I'd already been looking at.
She wasn't asking me to give up my life. She was asking me to make room. And I couldn't. Not because I didn't want to. Because I'd spent three years carefully building something with no room in it for anyone but me.
My parents figured this out without ever thinking about it. Nine kids. Jobs that wore their bodies down. They didn't have freedom. They had each other and a house that was always too small and too loud. And inside all that noise they built something I still can't build with all my silence. Forty years together. Not because it was easy. Because walking away wasn't something they considered.
I used to think that was their limitation. Now I think it might have been the thing that made everything else work. When leaving is never on the table, you learn how to stay. When staying is a choice you're re-making every single morning, you never fully arrive.
I sat on a bench by the river after she left that night. The Tagus was flat and the lights from Almada were reflecting off the water and I should have been thinking about her. Instead I was thinking about my dad driving to the same job site every morning for thirty years. He didn't love the drive. He loved what was waiting for him when he came home.
I've started doing something small. I told a woman I've been talking to where I'll be for the next four months. Said it out loud. Wrote it on her calendar. Not because I had to. Because I wanted to know what it felt like to let someone else plan around me for once.
It felt terrifying. Which tells me everything I need to know about how overdue it was.
Freedom is a room you build. I built mine with one chair. Now I'm trying to figure out how to fit a second one in without tearing down the walls.
That might be the hardest thing I've ever tried to build. And I once started a trucking company with eight hundred dollars and a cell phone.
— Best, Jose
