We sold the couch on a Tuesday. A man named Greg paid us forty euros and carried it down three flights of stairs by himself, and Amara cried a little in the kitchen, which surprised both of us. It was a bad couch. We'd complained about it for years. But it was our bad couch, and watching it go felt like the first real proof that this is actually happening.

For anyone just finding us: we're Tomas and Amara, and our daughter Ines is four. We've spent the last two years quietly arranging our lives so that we could leave them for a while. The plan is loose on purpose — roughly a year, maybe more, going slowly, west to east, no flights when a train will do.

The logistics have been less romantic than the idea. We put the good furniture and the books we couldn't part with into a storage unit the size of a closet, cancelled a phone plan that took forty minutes and two transfers, and learned that you cannot easily explain to a four-year-old that her room is going away but she is not.

We're scared, honestly. Not of the world — of the gap between who we are at home and who we'll have to become out there. But the couch is gone. So we suppose we're going too.

Next dispatch from Lisbon.

— Tomas, Amara & Ines