Port Happy
January 7, 2008
Four years ago I sat in an icy Covent Garden Market drinking an espresso with my friend. Not unusual, except that her near expired visa meant that the Atlantic Ocean and Equator would soon become dividers in our lives. The concepts of oceans and hemispheres were so grandiose and entirely incomprehensible to me at the time. I remember the surges of spine tingling awareness that replaced each exhalation of my wintry breath. Awareness that signified an indefinite division of our lives’ paths.
I kissed her impossibly soft, chilled cheek. I loved her. Despite round the houses conversing and the things that she missed, which I had taken care to be clear about. The reason was, when I looked into her eyes, I saw glimpses of her. I also however, loved all that was mysterious in a parallel Brazilian life. This was a new kind of yearning; one which I could neither fathom nor hope to know.
In the previous year I had grown. I felt that the two years in London before that had only been a small part of it. They were attached to the university, the institution, and so were the people. The small Brazilian community I had found myself in of late was a world apart. Why were these people so welcoming to me, without a binding reason like an organisation or shared way of life? The only possible reason, and a most delightful one: that one can show warmth and kindness to whomever they want, and the more people the better. A closer look and the reason became profound. Friendship, some great times and all round enthusiasm can literally be created, and simply by keeping that notion in one’s initial intentions.
January 7th, 2008
When the moment came that I waited for Michele in my hotel in Porto Alegre, I had already furthered that thinking. The logic that I would never see her again, so clear at the time, crushed. The longing for a parallel life had become an irrelevance. It’s one thing to say that the world is full of opportunities, but knowing that I would create and then take them was the important part of where I’d arrived. I stood in the foyer, deep in an abstract anticipation of the forgotten in the oven burnt pizza, music and extra cold beers we would share over the next few days.
A little later, Michele and I sat in the supermarket cafe on the edge of town drinking a Brahma chopp. Her dark eyes purveyed and gave as they always had, and I could tell from the connecting feeling, like two threads of electricity between us, that mine did too.
On leaving Porto Alegre my thoughts were of hope not sadness. Chest filled not with foreboding or finality, rather with the essence of love, a far greater depth of purity, and the some might say karmic properties that that holds.
