Currently listening to: Scar Tissue from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, wishing I had courage to go to their show with my students on the 12th…

It was about this time two years ago that I was still recovering from my three week visit to the Bahia. For some reason, I’ve been thinking about that trip a lot lately. It may have something to do with the fact that I have so much time on my hands…at least I do until next week when I start a new course. Lately, my days have consisted mainly of me hanging out with Fernando!, Carla, my soul sister and visiting my mom. I spend such a large portion of my day with them that I am hardly ever alone…but when I am, I think a lot about random things…one of them being in Bahia and my grandparents there.

Last week marked their 55^th wedding anniversary. Beautiful. I will be the first one to admit that a few years back, I was the hopeless romantic. I would be glued to the set when I would watch those sappy love stories [read: City of Angels, etc.] and sigh at the almost-always-happy endings. Nowadays, I’m the one who gags loudly when on-screen lovers kiss, and snorts even louder when they confess their love for one another. I roll my eyes and look, seemingly fascinated, at my nails when these lovefests occur on TV or in movies.

It’s not that I don’t believe in love…or even that I wouldn’t want to be one of those lucky characters who can throw out all that they have ever known or believed and allow themselves to be so thoroughly consumed by this “love” that they’ve found themselves a part of. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t wish that that was the way love went or that some of those fairy tales would find their own interpretation in my life. It’s just that, starting one second in one minute of my life about two years ago, I started this ever moving process toward cynicism. I am starting to question if, in the past, when I have uttered those words, if I ever really meant them…if I could ever say those words to someone and not have a passing thought in my head that it was some formality that had to be done to be able to move through in the relationship.

I say, “I love you.” on a daily basis. I say it to my family. I add it to the hugs I give my friends. I think it when I see these people and they don’t notice the gushing look I point in their direction, proud that they are in my life and honored to be in theirs. This is the kind of love that I know and know well. I have never and will never question the kind of love that I have for my family and friends. I can easily condense the members of those two groups to simply “family.” Because whether our brother or sisterhood exists in blood or sweat [haha - that is an inside joke], my feelings are unwaivering. Romantic love, though? The thought gives me the heebie jeebies…

Hmm…how did this whole entry turn into a discussion of my fear of commitment? I don’t know but, instead of going with a smooth transition, let’s just dive right back into the topic I had originally wanted to talk about – my grandparents.

I suppose that if I ever did get around to letting myself love someone in that romantic way, I would want that dream to be similar to the one that my grandparents have shared for the past 55+ years. They still hold hands when they walk. He helps put cream lotion on her sore muscles just before they lay down for the night. She sneaks more food onto his plate when he turns away to wipe his glasses. They pray every night together and I have heard them,  running down the names of all of their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, asking for God’s eye to watch over them. I see these things and I can’t help but wish that for myself, for everyone, really- to have such a bond that even silences are a form of communication. They talk to one another through their eyes and their hands- and through laughter that sometimes erupts for reasons that no one else would ever understand, a secret that they share only with one another. A secret that I believe myself unworthy to discover.

They have survived a child, a grandchild, and a great grandchild and were the ones to help us all recover after each one of those tragedies picked at the fiber of our family’s strength and faith. If they were ever scared, we didn’t know it…and not because they believed fear equal to cowardice, but because they wanted to allow us to be scared and still have a sense of bravery and strength, whose source was their own. They love unconditionally and I’m not ashamed to admit that during the time I spent with them in their home in the Itabuna two years ago, I cried myself to sleep many times, happy to have been able to see the land that had nurtured not only our family income, but this rare love that my grandparents have built over the years….

I think I’m starting to babble AND I’m itching to draw so I will cut this right here… and maybe I’ll pick up sometime later… but until then, I have an assignment for y’all. If you have someone you love but you never really told them so, I urge you to say it today. I, of course, am not going to go and tell you to do something and not do it myself. In the words of Barry White, “practice what you preach.” I know exactly who I am going to say these words to – it won’t be the first time but it will be in a way…I hope you have someone in mind, as well.

Take care

*Blogging from work, breaktime. After a hectic week, I can finally rest my mind. In the walkman: Monsoon wedding Soundtrack, wishing I were sleeping…

My baby needs a pilot
She has no magic wand
To help her part the troubled waters
Of the Rubicon
But in my soul I know she´ll
Have to go this one alone
After all that is the only way she´s ever known

After all that is the only way I’ve ever known.

I need to put some distance between me and this place. To be in a thousand other places, to drive along BR116 all the way to Serra do Cipó… to walk down Paulista Avenue and tip the mustached violinist… to rest and linger in Ipiranga Museum’s garden… to walk down Oscar Freire St… to flutter by Liberdade, the oriental place… to dance down any dance club at night. All the places I’ve been, and feel as if I’ve never been.

My feet want to wear the red shoes and tap merrily down a path, any path. I want decadence and foreign languages, and the feeling of starlight on my skin. I miss the sound of sweetgrass in the breeze, and sleeping in silk.

I tell myself that I’ve won my freedom, that I will live life on my terms after this interlude.

There’s a persistent and sad little voice that begs me to walk away, to find the first trail. I chose to walk into my Rubicon. It’s my responsibility to see it through. Freedom did not come cheaply for me, and I have to accept that. I have to accept the barren road.

where to?

*In the woods, listening to Savage Garden…

my love is like water
pinned down and abused
for being strange…

i’ve often tried to hold the sea
the sun the fields the sky

I went to the bookstore yesterday. Just a Fnac, coffee shop attached, the icon of Brazilian intellectual-lite bliss that comforts me, square glasses all around , and all. In trying to look for a book that would resonate with all my inclinations… I failed.

I’ve been getting that lately, gentle reader.

I can no longer go into bookstores seeking out a book written out in my voice. Because it will never be there, not until I find my voice and write it. I suppose I’ll have to write an opus or two. The hardest part, as a friend pointed out, is that I do tend to try to hold that sea — my writing suffers from an inability to focus, detail one life experience at a time.

Damn it!