So here I am, back to Colombia,
trying to put into blogs the last eight months of my life. This has proven to
be an extremely hard task as while I try to adapt to my new life in a country
that doesn’t quite feel like my own anymore every time I think of Brazil my heart
aches and my eyes are filled with tears. I am here, physically in Colombia, but
my mind and heart are back in Brazil and I can’t seem to let go. While I try to
write about a specific event, memories fill my mind as it fights itself because
I don’t want to remember, I don’t want to feel.
Also, I believe that while writing
about my experience I must write in such a way that honors the people, the
places, the teachings and all that belongs to those memories I’m trying so hard
to put into words. I know I am a perfectionist and that I’m often too hard on
myself but I love them and miss them so much this is what I am dealing with now:
I feel angry and sad because I had a
wonderful experience that felt like a lifetime, in a place that I now call
home, in a foreign language that I don’t listen to everyday anymore, with
people that I love and miss having in my everyday life, and I can´t have it
back, not anymore, not in the same way again. So while I try to grasp upon those life
changing moments this is what goes through my mind:
"I want to wake up in Morro do Fortunato early
in the morning; I want to go downhill to my job at the primary school with the
wonderful fifth-graders and profe Nidia;
I want to have lunch at grandma Kidinha’s
house and have her farofa; I want to
get a carona (ride) with the school
bus taking the baby’s to their kindergarten so that I can hug them and count
the cows on the way; I want to be in the heat of Garopaba and have açaí at Brotô; I want to spend that half an hour I have to kill at the
beach in Centro to take a breath and
thank God for how lucky and happy I feel; I want to then cross town walking to Atitude
for my Ragga class. I want to forget the
world while I dance and learn those new steps Ju got us all excited about; I want to go up to Morro again in the
5:45 bus that goes all the way up to Morro,
thank God, and find my great grandma avô
Maia getting guavas for her great-grandsons with a bamboo stick three times
her size; I want to have café da tarde
with my mother and get everything ready so that we have dinner before the telenovela “Ao Outro Lado do Paraíso” starts
and we seat as a family to find out what happened to Clara; I want to go to sleep and thank God that the weekend is
close because I’ll get to have breakfast at the organic market “Mercado do Produtor” and then spend the
day with Giacomo…"
In conclusion, I want to write something
that demonstrates how happy I was in Brazil, how much I grew there, how much I
value the last eight months of my life. However, for now, all I seem to be able
to do is to honor my feelings and treasure my memories until I make peace with
the mixed emotions. Then, as I figure it out, I want to honor my experience and
write about all those amazing things that happened this year because they
deserve to be written and to be shared.
