Elsewhere
Loved ones accompanied me yesterday to see a concert and a movie (with lyrics, screenplay and direction by one of my favorite German authors, who sadly deceased too early taking his own life two decades ago). It’s been a while since I did so: to be part of a celebration that is also a statement of an absence. Let’s face it, the general horizon is quite dark on various levels right now. The simple act of falling asleep or waking up on time demands so much of my effort to fight back the will to fade. It could not have been more fitting.
It‘s one year tomorrow since I started to write this blog. November is hard for many Berliners and it’s getting harder for me with the passage of time. Whether it is the perception of my own ageing, the materialization of long-term social consequences that the very beginning of the second winter in the pandemic reveals or the day to day clearer impossibilities that the state of the world determines, there is a sense of irreversibility in me at this time of the year increasingly engraving itself. Irreversibility is not necessarily negative, but its acknowledgment makes it almost impossible to break patterns and forge desired, necessary changes.
Still undecided if this exercise constitutes an alternative to more mundane escapisms, I am sure it is still and each time a renewed attempt to reach out for some depth in communication, need that I can hardly let go of, no matter how much more superficial connections I can handle. In my mind, and as long as I am writing these lines, there will always be someone listening and eventually replying back somehow, even if it’s only myself - that too is not that granted. I am trying to establish different kinds of closeness and commitment, which is rare to find and so needed to survive anywhere. For me, at least. I get it, that’s not popular once you’re getting more loaded contours in this day and age, but I’m sure that there are more people still craving it as hell beyond the family circle. I think that I will always look for an authentic exchange instead of multiple chances of vacant social opportunities; it’s either that or I’ll end up giving up and go Walden (and simultaneously insane).
The turmoil that often constitutes my thoughts has never endured neither isolation nor monochromatic bubbles very well, I can only rejoice to have returned to a more or less quotidian public expression of its existence... qualitative results aside. It would be easy to say that those would have been better if I had written strictly in Portuguese for one year, but then I wouldn't have been able to hold this mirror up in the same way. I almost abandoned German lately, but I couldn’t leave the English out of the equation. I guess reaching out to different people means more to me now than perfecting my style, and that is refreshing somehow, because I used to be an absolute grammar freak before migrating. The label [ENG] is the most used one in the blog and for that I am sorry, as I believe the proficient use of language also opens possibilities of reality in itself. I am trying to write more often in Portuguese as of now. Apart from idioms and pandemic labels, the most frequent ones so far have been: time, Berlin, living autobiography, community, communication, music and future.
With this in mind, I am now assured that I will surely keep on writing whenever I can. Be it on these virtual pages, on my notebooks, sending letters, drawing words on walls or working with children and actors, that is to say reflecting on my path among those of others by the means of syntax, with all those who wish to take the time to be a part of it. If that is interesting to the world I know, I don’ care so much anymore, as that world interests me a bit less every passing year. It is clear now that it is not my wish to exist there anymore, and I am not so sure about the possibility of an existing elsewhere I’d rather be.
❤️
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