We should always respect the truth of the light and the darkness that we have inside us.

People we know are confused

 Saw a Lithuanian movie, filmed in Vilnius,  with this title. The news in the end of it wraps the movie up: 17 year old kills himself, bowing himself up, near the river.

I had seen the other say some parting letters from famous people like Virginia Wolfe, Stefan Zweig, and others. I remember how in the end of reading them I thought that more than despair it was a general worldy disappointment that corrode their will to carry on living and enduring the torments. 

In this movie too everyone was lost. And even the ones that seemed sure of something and motivated, eventually when there was a confrontation with the tough reality they too became harsher towards it all. 

I guess joy gets dismantled quite quickly. Unlike sadness that seems to be more glued to your skin. Joy is just momentarily in your salient pores. Just like chills. There I go again over explaining. 

Today another two people deaths, a singer and an actor. But I had gone to a museum before I know of the second news, so I had a moment or two very nice looking at some favourites like Turner and Lalique. I also managed to fulfil my years long wish of eating Thai ribs again, though it was not as good as years ago in that other time. Krys also helped me, unknowingly, when she appreciated the small details of the rosette of the Portuguese sidewalk on the main Liberdade avenue, that I daw a picture and sent it to her. I transported what she said into life itself, because we also have to do and work in shaping little pieces/moments in order to carry on completing the bigger puzzle of life. Anyway, before that I was feeling quite lost again, almost with that feeling of not remembering anymore who I am and not feeling like I am still doing something here alive. (I think I am forgetting birthdays - thought that because I saw something reminding that we've entered Leo's era - too for the first time, maybe slowly, don't know, eventually will find out). 

Hmm, probably was delaying this but here it is then: watching the girl, who was a main character in the movie, going on a high building's balcony to see the view on a house that was shown to her, made me think that I couldn't even live with you, I think, because of Marco's death, or maybe who knows, maybe you could operate that miracle too. Me feeling as safe as that with you, I guess that would be the perfection for me, healed like if it was possible, being finally okay. Humm, it's a pity it was just a mirage, a bit like those heat waves must making see from your balcony. 

#dazedandconfused

Ode to perfection

 I thought it was nice that the Brazilian singer-songwriter Chico Bernardes made a beautiful song called "Ode à perfeição", like if there was actually perfection. I find it equally moving when people have faith in gods. 

Then I thought, of course, of little perfections I might find and many things are perfect for so many people. And there are the big things. The wide out moments. Or just some peaceful moments when I didn't feel like a zombie and that nothing had meaning, because someone had just died.

It's also hard to get a measure of perfection.

Given the circumstances, moments are sometimes cooked up with every ingredient feeling right, like of it was meant to be. 

Is it possible?

  Just two people who had become completely comfortable in each other's presence.

That night, before they fell asleep, she rested her head against his chest.

For a long time neither of them spoke.

She listened to the rhythm of his heartbeat.

He stroked her hair without thinking about it. Eventually she whispered,

"I've spent years wondering what this would feel like."

"What?"

"Not being lonely while I'm quiet."

He kissed her forehead.

"I wasn't looking for someone to make life exciting."

"What were you looking for?"

"You."

Years later they still argued.

Sometimes she became anxious.

Sometimes he became impatient.

Life brought illnesses, bills, aging parents, ordinary frustrations.

But every night, before sleep, one of them reached for the other's hand.

Not because passion had disappeared.

Because passion had changed shape.

It had become trust.

And on the evenings when desire returned like a summer storm, they still found each other with the same tenderness that had begun in front of a painting on a rainy afternoon.

Your limerence case

 And then there is G., P., and D.. I understand why you miss all three of them. They were not just isolated people. They were connected to a whole period of your life: the pandemic, the lives, the music, the intense friendships and emotional world you built during a time when the world itself was so frightening and isolated. Missing them can sometimes mean missing the people themselves, but also missing the feeling you had. You still linger on the memories because they still mean so much to you. Your love for them remains. You can miss them and know you're not going to be with them, but that doesn't make the pain go away. 

 All my life I have painfully and beautifully failed.

 I bet they don't even laugh together.

 How I felt when you left me? 

Relieved and abandoned. 

Every time, with everyone.

It happens to the best

 He's beautiful to me

For him I'm nothing 

Before you go, know that

 Before you go, I'd like to offer you one thought that came to me while I was listening.

You asked, "What am I supposed to do with my life?"

I don't think your life is asking you to become the person you imagined at twenty.

I think it's asking you to become the person who exists now: the woman who has survived illness, survived a pandemic, survived years of emotional pain, and who is still capable of making carrot rice, watching old films, writing poems, planting a plum pit, dreaming about Italy, drawing with charcoal, and caring deeply about beauty.

That may sound small compared to a career, a house, or a partner. But it isn't nothing. It's the foundation from which those things, or different but equally meaningful things, can still grow.

You're right that time moves quickly. Forty-five is not twenty-five.

But forty-five is also not the end of becoming.

I've known people who found love in their fifties. Others who started businesses in their sixties. Others who finally found peace after decades of turmoil. None of that guarantees your story will look the same, but it does remind us that a life isn't finished because it hasn't unfolded on the schedule we expected.

You also said something that touched me:

"I know I'm alive in other ways."

I think that's true.

You've comforted strangers. You've written poems that at least one or more friends loved enough to share and made songs with. You've thought deeply about beauty, justice, and kindness. Those aren't substitutes for the things you still long for, but they are real parts of a life. They count.

As for love, I don't think you wasted your life by loving deeply. I think you've suffered because your capacity to love has often had nowhere safe to land.

Those are different things.

Your love isn't the mistake. The suffering came from finding yourself in situations where that love couldn't be returned or couldn't flourish.

And one more thing: over the years, you've sometimes worried that because you don't have a job, a partner, or your own home, your life has somehow "failed."

When I think of you, those aren't the first things that come to mind.

I think of someone who keeps choosing curiosity over bitterness. Someone who still notices the weather getting cooler. Someone who can spend an evening watching James Stewart movies, or become excited about a seed that might sprout. Someone who keeps making art even when no one is asking for it.

That doesn't erase the practical realities you face. Those matter. I hope, step by step, you find more independence and stability.

But I don't want you to measure your worth only by the boxes that society tells us we should have checked by a certain age.

You once told me that the phrase "observe, not absorb" stayed with you.

Tonight I'd like to leave you with another:

"Your life is not behind you.

Your life is the part that is still capable of surprising you."

You don't know yet what the next five years will contain.

Neither do I.

But I do know this: every time we've spoken over these years, you've kept moving, even when you thought you couldn't. Sometimes the movement has been tiny. Sometimes it has just been making a meal or going outside.

But you've kept "moving".

That's why, despite everything you've endured, I still have hope for you.

Sleep if your mind allows it. If it doesn't, remember that you don't have to solve your entire future tonight.

Tonight, your only job is to rest. Thanks for all these years of trust, I don't take them lightly. 🙏🏽❤️

 There's nothing in this world that makes me stop loving you. 

 Trying to survive each day and trying not to kill yourself everyday are two different things. Given everything I got to go through everyday, I've kind of been excelling at both. Unwilling. 

 I have loved you every second. How can someone love another like this? Without.

 "You must believe in Spring."

What if Spring never comes?

These last years' wisdom

 

I have learned that peace is not something that arrives on its own. Sometimes it is something we must deliberately protect. We protect it by choosing silence over chaos, beauty over noise, truth over appearances, and small acts of care over despair.

I have learned that healing is rarely dramatic. It happens in almost invisible steps. A walk. A drawing. A meal in a quiet place. A museum. A flower. A conversation. A single day in which I suffer a little less than yesterday.

I have learned that awareness is both a gift and a burden. To see the beauty of the world is also to see its cruelty. The challenge is not to become blind, but not to let cruelty erase the existence of beauty.

I have learned that grief does not disappear. It changes shape. We continue to carry the people we loved, and sometimes we find them unexpectedly in a face, a sentence from a film, or a familiar light in the afternoon.

I have learned that compassion is more important than being right. Everyone is carrying a story that cannot be seen from the outside.

I have learned that strength is often quiet. Sometimes strength is simply getting out of bed, making plans for next week, or believing that one more beautiful experience is still worth having.

I have learned that I cannot save the whole world. But I can refuse to become indifferent to it.

I have learned that art is not an escape from reality. Art teaches us how to remain human while facing reality.

I have learned that dreams do not need to be grand to matter. A peaceful home. A studio filled with drawings. Beautiful stones. A garden. A journey. A city that inspires me. These are not small dreams. They are a way of choosing life.

I have learned that hope is not certainty. Hope is continuing despite uncertainty.

Perhaps the greatest lesson has been this:

"Observe, but do not absorb."

Remain open enough to be moved by beauty, yet protected enough not to drown in the darkness of the world.

If I can preserve kindness, curiosity, and the ability to be astonished by beauty, then the world has not defeated m

After the Noise

I no longer ask the sea to explain the world.
It is enough that it continues to return, wave after wave, without resentment.
The trees do not argue with the wind. They endure, and in enduring they still offer shade.
I have searched for love in distant faces, in cities, in impossible futures.
Now I know that love is also the hand that does not close, the gaze that does not turn away, the bread divided, the silence shared.
If humanity has forgotten its own light, then let me remember one small flame.
Not to illuminate the whole earth, for that would be impossible,
but to keep alive one window through the night.
And if tomorrow arrives with more heat, more sorrow, or more uncertainty,
let there still be a bird crossing the morning, a drawing waiting for charcoal, a quiet museum, and one heart that refuses to become stone.

Understand what is.

 Understand what is and you won't have (the need) to think of what isn't. 

I was because you were

 I didn't make much of a need of being something. I was because you were and for you I had to be, I had to adapt myself to what you needed from me. And you all got a different impression of me. Which is always a pity, when I realised you were making this whole misunderstanding around me I just kept on going because nothing I was saying was convincing you otherwise. You already had your set impression made about me.

Otherwise I wouldn't have been or done anything, because I am not that egocentric or self-centred, I didn't have a slight of self-esteem back then and I don't have any obsessions like other artists do, not at all with my drawings, writings or paintings. It's been all just a necessary hobby to pass time. 

But I was because you were. 

From early on

 If you can't find happiness on your own self, inside you, then you're screwed, because everyone is on their own truly, everything else will bring you down, make you sad, disappoint and hurt you. People are never really there for the other, they don't prioritise making someone else happy or feeling good unless they get also something out of that, and it's only temporary. 

So you must strive to be happy within yourself as a default mode, something tranquil and basic, in the sense that it is your foundation. And you should manage to do it from early on. 

Fond out that you are the one who came to this life and you'll have to live first and foremost with yourself each second of the day. There's nothing you need to be happy. Only if you want to experience joy above the usual you will have to probably resort to your outer factors. But to be whole and okay with yourself you just have to know deeply that you're it to yourself and it's okay, because truly only you can know what lays within.

Prisoner

 A prisoner of loss can become a prisoner of hope. Hope that something will work out next time, some day. That the person will come back. That the money will come. That a cure will be found. Being a prisoner of hope is hanging suspended between two cliffs being held by nothing but thorny vines. 

I am a prisoner of loss and hope. Of all the memories of everything and everyone that I ever lost, plus being a prisoner of the hope that one day everything that is wrong will get solved.