Thirst makes me a modern woman
K is trying to convince me to come to Trumps tonight for a sticker party. We’re standing outside Drama Bar in the leathery midnight heat, passing a vape back and forth. I bought it today – 5,000 pulls for just €15! – and it’s giving me a contact high with a regulated nervous system. J and I have promised each other we’re going to quit, that we don’t need another vice. But considering the day I’ve had, I’m giving myself a break.
'What’s a sticker party?' I ask, humouring K.
'It’s when you put a sticker on someone when you find them attractive.'
I think of E. 'Sounds stressful.'
'You can say thirsty?' D crows. 'And then slap your QR code stickers on them.'
'I doubt anyone at Trumps wants to be covered in QR codes for a map of Lisbon’s water fountains,' I say.
D wants to know where I got the idea to make the map, and I launch into the explanation I’ve been perfecting: about my summer of urban hiking; how I am that useless thing called a flâneur; how the map was born out of necessity and fear and rage.
'There was a heatwave in Europe, and I thought it was pretty shitty no one knew where the public drinking fountains were.'
***
These are not the only reasons I started mapping Lisbon’s drinking fountains – bebedouros in Portuguese. I don’t tell D about the fear I have, that there’s a thirst in me I cannot quench. Or about how in the days after I had the panic attack on E’s birthday and confessed my feelings, then he went to Germany for two weeks with the promise we’d “talk” when he returned, it became a kind of obsession:
Create an open access mapping project. Don’t text E. Prove your Goodness and Worthiness. Don’t watch E’s Instagram stories. Be Sexy and Focused on Your Art. Map enough bebedouros that E will like you.
***
In Of Walking in Ice, Werner Herzog describes a walk he embarked on from Munich to Paris in 1974 to save the life of his friend and mentor, the filmmaker Lotte Eisner. ‘I set off on the most direct route to Paris, in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot.’ Walking as bargain. As prayer. As a last-ditch effort at quid pro quo, in which only God knows the legalese.
***
In Portuguese, bebedouro literally means “golden drink,” but is not, I am disappointed to learn, a reference to piss.
***
I start walking in June, at the height of the heatwave. It’s been a year since J lost his job and we’ve finally agreed to move back to Ireland in the autumn. We will live with his parents while he looks for work in the civil service. In December, I will turn thirty-five.
We’ve contemplated this move before, during our four years in Lisbon. It’s an easy place to tread water, if you’re not careful. And of course, there is the problem of money. We’ve never had enough of it, and now we have none. J has found part-time work as a tour guide, but it’s not a long-term solution.
We have every reason to leave, but J still wants to hold on. It was his idea to remain another year, his insistence that we weren’t done with the city.
***
There are over 400 bebedouros in Lisbon, according to data compiled by the municipality. The most recent generation was added between 2020 and 2023 and has spigots at their base, under which are silver dog bowls. These aren’t bolted to the ground, and maybe it’s because I haven’t been able to stop crying since my confession to E, or maybe it’s because I’ve had two phones stolen out of my pocket on this same block, but when I see the silver dog bowl sitting undisturbed under the bebedouro on the Almirante Reis, I weep.
***
The thing about piss is funny because shortly after meeting E, I write an essay about wanting J to piss on me. I perform it at a reading in front of all our friends and afterwards vape outside while strangers ask leading questions about our marriage. The essay is a love letter to J, but it is inspired by E, who sends me poems about eating pussy and his father gardening and a horse with five legs. All of these are about God, I know. None of them are about me.
It’s a tale as old as time, so cliché I could vomit: AREA GIRL DESIRES TO BE PISSED ON BY HUSBAND AFTER MASTURBATING TO CRUSH’S ESSAY ON LICKING HIS EX’S PERIOD BLOOD.
***
‘I feel sick all the time,’ J tells me, after I try and fail to seduce him. ‘I miss having money,’ he tells me, as we walk past the natural wine bar where we went on a spontaneous date last June. In July, he called while I was at a festival outside Barcelona to tell me Microsoft had pulled its funding and the company was closing. I drove back to Lisbon in two six-hour shifts, rainstorms painting test strips ahead of me on the highway.
***
E is published in prestigious magazines and is a lecturer in autofiction, but that isn’t why I like him. I like him because when I tell him we’re reading The Sluts for the erotic book club J and I run, he offers to invite Dennis Cooper.
‘Do you know him?’ I ask, astonished, and he laughs. ‘No,’ he says, ‘but he lives in Paris, and we might as well ask.’
***
I worry that walking with the purpose of finding bebedouros will be tedious, could defeat the flâneurian spirit of walking, the dérive’s principles of chance and whimsy. But my quest gives me clarity, opens up new neighbourhoods like ripe fruit. The city has a way of directing you, nudging you where it wants you to go. Guy Debord: “the path of least resistance that is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the terrain); the appealing or repelling character of certain places – these phenomena all seem to be neglected.”
Bebedouros, I quickly learn, are stationed in such places of “least resistance”. At the corners of parks and busy intersections. Around miradouros and outdoor calisthenics gyms. In children’s playgrounds. They want to be found.
***
After Microsoft’s latest labour reductions, investors pushed the stock’s closing price above $500 for the first time on July 9. The company announced the layoffs of about 9,000 people a week earlier. The cuts are reflective of an overall trend across the tech industry, with over 80,000 positions at Microsoft eliminated to date in 2025. The company’s CEO pointed to artificial intelligence in a memo.
***
When I meet E, I am already changing. Four years of ghostwriting romance novels, of chasing after underpaid Upwork contracts, of churning out slop barely better than AI, has been its own lesson in humiliation. On more than one occasion, I’ve had to borrow rent from my aunt, even after she got cancer. J’s choice to stay is a catalyst. We make a new group of friends that August. In September, I’m awarded my first writing residency. The next month, my book deal. By December, I’ve started working on a new literary novel, the first in years. By April, I already have the feeling, when I pull the Eight of Swords above a smoking altar, that I am calling back in my Life’s Eros.
So I’m not entirely surprised when, the next evening, I meet a German poet with neck tattoos who tells me I’m smart and witty.
It doesn’t matter that nothing can come of it; he is epinephrine.
We begin talking almost every day, exchanging long texts, then voicenotes, on mysticism and relationships and writing. Everything feels lustful and open, like I am blooming right into someone’s waiting hands. It is not sex I’m after but the erotic spark of creation. E says he wants to start a zine with me, and I don’t hesitate to say yes, devoid at last of all self-doubt. I begin reading dense theoretical texts. I research creative PhDs. I consider quitting writing romance novels for good. Possibility arouses me, like the blue in the corner of E’s profile picture, that expanse of heaven I see whenever I close my eyes.
***
The essay on piss is accepted into a small, unknown literary magazine. I toy with turning down the contract. On the one hand, a publication is a publication. On the other, I want to have faith in myself, that I can get in somewhere better.
***
When I post my map on Instagram, I get a startling amount of interest. People want to participate. They ask to be added as collaborators. I make stickers with a QR code to the map and plaster them all over the city. My mom asks how I will know if my map “has gone viral”.
The QR code expires and I’m informed I can pay $39.99/month to keep it active. You can crowdfund the money, B texts me. I’ll contribute! I use a free QR code website instead to make new stickers and have to hike around the city to cover up the old ones.
E and J both add to the map. K finds a bebedouro outside Baixa-Chiado but can’t figure out how to drop a pin. L sends the map to her roommates and suggests we add pictures. I get an email that 10 people have scanned my defunct QR code, but I can still pay $39.99/month to revive it. G texts the group chat: Could someone send that water fountain map! 🥵
I update my website with the map and my manifesto to create a participatory experience that is both fun and disruptive, radical and whimsical, undermining the capitalist vision of cities as individualized spaces void of real human connection.
***
J is tougher than me. He never complains, even when he dresses in the yellow shirt he’s required to wear, or when he’s scheduled for two shifts in a row, or when he returns from five hours of walking tourists around the city in the heat with only €20.
But even he has a breaking point. And when he tells me about the civil service job his mom says he’s a shoe-in for, we are both so relieved we cry.
***
I’m a sucker for posting thirst traps, but since I met E, things have gotten out of hand. He’s moved to Lisbon for love, but he’s adrift. Between applying to PhDs and lecturer positions, he doesn’t know what he’s doing here. Always one for a challenge, I take him to the Cinemateca to see old films, to sun-soaked miradouros where we drink beer on lazy Sundays, to the tiny art gallery my friend owns, where the proximity of our bodies makes me flushed and giggly. In the compressed stillness, I ask if he’s in touch with spirits.
‘No, he says, ‘but Kate is.
There is someone he’s longing for, too, and he still has hope she will take him back.
***
Nate Lippens writes: “Don’t take life advice from anyone who is a parent – they’re under contract to believe in a future.”
None of my friends are parents. A guy in my writing group says, ‘I’m kind of conservative about this, but I think everyone would have kids if they could afford it.’ When I tell him he should read more feminist theory, he asks if I think women in non-western countries aren’t feminists. I have no idea what to say to this. In truth, I probably would have kids if I could afford it. But then there’s the piss thing: sometimes fantasy is better than reality.
***
The day before E returns from Germany, I hike north to a neighbourhood I rarely visit. The sun is braising at my back, but it feels good to walk, to feel anxiety and lust leak out of me as perspiration, to replenish my body’s water with the city’s.
I find nine bebedouros that day, each one like unearthing buried treasure. In just a few weeks, I have mapped fifty. I want at least 100 before we leave Lisbon, but that number keeps climbing, just like the heat. This summer already, “Western Europe has been seared by four heat waves, shattering temperature records” and killing approximately 25,000 people.
I wonder what will happen to my map after I leave, if others will keep it alive. Will I return to Lisbon years from now, once J and I have good jobs and a house and a kid, to find the stickers fading, their edges browned and curling? Will there even be a Lisbon to return to?
***
On 1 August, J and I give notice to our landlord. To console ourselves, we agree to quit vaping after the move. That night, for K’s birthday, we finally all go to Trumps. At 3:30 in the morning, as we sit outside on a stoop giving each other backrubs, C gets yelled at by the bouncer for trying to bring us bottles of water from the bar.
‘If only there was a handy map of the city’s bebedouros,’ I remind them. ‘We could just refill the bottles.’
When we find one two blocks away – mapped by me two weeks earlier – we fall over ourselves in glee. The world is burning, but water is still free if you know where to look for it, outside the club just before dawn with all the people you love most in the world.
***
E finally comes back from Germany, and at a quiosque on the Avenida, he tells me about the anxiety he felt hanging over Cologne. He stayed with a friend who told him that the Ford manufacturing plant, the city’s largest employer, will close by 2030. We agree that it’s pointless to make plans, only dreams. Only poetry. ‘God is in everything,' he says.
I look at the tattoo on his neck that says C’mere.
There’s so much that’s unsaid, so I say it: that he makes everything feel possible, and the rest doesn’t matter.
I cry as I walk to Drama Bar, where everyone is waiting.
***
In the end, I accept the small literary magazine. Real faith is believing that I will write something better. A few days later, upon checking the silver dog bowls again, I discover they are, in fact, bolted to the ground. I’m not sure what this does to my conviction.
***
A friend of a friend sends a photo of one of my stickers. Is this you??
How will I know when my map has gone viral? When Aquafina goes out of business. When there are no more deaths in heatwaves. When there are no more heatwaves.
***
The day after he returns from Germany, E sends me a Fanny Howe poem about how the way we love another person is a reflection of the way we love God, the world.
I close the phone and continue my walk. J is working today, too. And there are more bebedouros to find.
Cover image: Courtesy of writer.