Last week two thrilling things happened: I got sick, and I finally watched Barbie with my best friends from High School. You can imagine how it must’ve been, to be laying slightly unconscious on your living room sofa sweating your heart out on Tuesday, then laughing, wiping a couple of tears on Saturday, and sitting with your mind in an empty trance as the ending credits roll out, thousands of names coming and going to the sound of “What was I made for?”. Include the fact that of the 3 of you, you’re the only one without a job and that you played with Barbies until you were 9.
Before you consider leaving, this letter wont be a commentary on the movie (I do leave a review at the bottom), nor will I spoil essential details. The heart of this letter has been beating for a couple of weeks now, a tea brewing a particular taste. I’ve been thinking about the concept of ‘close’. What makes us close to each other? How close is ‘close enough’? How close is ‘too close’? What does the ‘best’ before the word ‘friend’ imply? What distance truly lies between those two words? Is it an universal meaning, road signs we all read in the same way?
It takes so little to make friends, create love. To be known is to be loved. My friends see yellow and trace it back to me; because I used a gif of a racoon using a shopping cart often, racoons have somehow become my assigned animal. My friends know my habits better than I probably do, and keep their arms open regardless. They’ll admit out loud I’m being weird without a hint of judgement, and will stay and hear me as I dive into useless topics just for the sake of listening. To be loved is to be changed. Cue to the Garfield toy picture. I’ve tied countless items and faces to those I love with red threads. I’ve incorporated them in my days, I carry their words and actions as charms, I keep them in a folder with a yellow heart on my phone. Even if I might forget, there’s a certainty that I’ll remember. When I glance at We Bare Bears or see a strawberry or an otter or a slug or that way too specific thing to name here that they love, I’ll remember. Love echoes. Isn’t this closure? Isn’t memory love?
Simultaneously, it takes so little to doubt love. A glance, a touch, a word in a certain tone. A missed or unexpected appointment. A soft spot that gets bruised and goes untreated, a truth that never leaves the lips and grows poisonous fungus. When you are ‘close’ to a person, I don’t know if you’re supposed to be confident — but something tells me you are. Or at the very least, that you should trust that this thread that ties the both of you won’t break if you look away, if you take a step back, push it, tangle it, or bend it a little too hard. You can be clumsy with it. You can be clumsy with my love. There should be differences, that the ‘best’ in ‘best friend’ should mean a stronger, straight, tidy thread. Funnily enough, it’s the exact opposite, at least with me. Ultimately, to love is a choice, and choices aren’t always easy. Some are made at the top of unsteady hills, or as you fall from a cliff and whisper your last wish before imminent dead. Some are impulsive — except I believe no choice truly is that way, those ‘impulsive’ ones you just get to walk backwards into — some you had to convince yourself that they really, truly are worth it. Choices take a lot of sacrifice out of us don’t they? It’s terrifying.
There is this line in a movie I love: the closer you look, the less you see. A line in a song I used to replay goes ‘space was just a word made up by someone who’s afraid to get too close’. In the back of my head plays this memory of someone from the south of my country pointing a finger at us in the north for taking everything too seriously and ‘not knowing how to take a joke’. I wonder if I do act that way, and come to the conclusion that I can’t help it. In Armchair Confessions I read, “i realize now that my expectations reveal much more about my character than it ever did about his” and days later a friend reaches out and asks if they can tell me something, and I notice that the first thing I wait for is a critique. I braced myself for punishment. In the end of their heartfelt advice, they say “you are your own person”. It doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t seem true.
Aren’t we all bits and rags of whatever we love? What happens to us when we’re no longer loved? When love stops being everything? The closer and harder I seem to try, the less things seem to work my way. So I go for a perspective shift. Rejection is redirection, I repeat it until I believe it, I never really do, but the phrase still sounds somewhat true nonetheless. One time a recruiter told me that getting no answer from companies was essentially a favourable circumstance, because I wouldn’t wish to work in a place like that. I never received an official rejection from her (oh the irony). Instead of being careful and thoughtful with my choices, I open up the Wheel of Names website on a Wednesday and write 6 variants of ‘Try Again’, and only 1 ‘Don’t Try’. I spin the wheel. It falls on ‘Don’t Try’. Years ago, I can’t for the life of me recall where, I heard that apparently when you’re flipping a coin to make a choice, your brain unconsciously decides as it flips. While the wheel was spinning, I was wondering in which of the 6 options it’d fall on. Life is all kinds of funny when you least expect.
It’s safe to say that this year, my identity is all over the place. My sense of worth as been low for as long as I can remember, but I can’t call to mind a time when my selfhood felt so scrambled up, boring eggs getting stuck to a pan. I write a lot about deserving bad things in here, and somewhere along the way it became more than a topic, than a possibility. It became a belief. An identity based on chastisement sounds somewhat final, resolute. It doesn’t have to be true or right or fun, but it’s something to hold on to, I guess. You can twist any story to make yourself the bad guy. It’s a sort of ‘And they lived happily ever after.’ in the very last page of a book. Revolving my life around shame is a self destructive practice — and extremely easy. Basing it on all that is beyond my reach, from people’s perceptions of who I am, to comparison, envy of what others have, places where I ‘don’t fit in’ (when what matters is to belong), efforts that didn’t get the outcome I wanted, shortcomings I can’t compensate for.
Just for the record, I believe there is nobility in giving up. I myself have given up in multiple, thousand of situations in my life, I’m no stranger to that. But today, I’m speaking about giving up on a career that has barely begun, on the effort that comes with love — because effortless love is more of a myth you entertain, and feels real every other sunday; I’m talking about giving up on trying, which in a way, means giving up on life. It means giving up on myself, directly, indirectly, somehow.
At the end of a particular gruelling moment, when my tears had dried, I found myself asking: where does my heart lay? My emotions pile up like abandoned clothes on top of a chair. I have been trying for so long, I lost sight of the view, or how long I’ve walked, whose hands I still hold in mine, all the fun. Where does my heart lay? No one can answer except me. Where does my heart lay? Rejection, depression, the passage of days have all tampered with my ability to believe in the world and its histories, its twists and turns, like a kid catching their mom laying the presents under the Christmas Tree. There will always be more questions than answers. I fear I can’t believe in anything. How do you learn to believe again? Can you love something you don’t believe in? Is your identity built on what you love or what you believe?
Life is fickle, and so is my optimism. Maybe my heart isn’t fond of it, even if I do have a tendency to always store some hope — and wouldn’t you say that that is optimism, in a way? Isn’t optimism hope in a heavy coat? People change because change is what we all do while we’re too busy thinking we’re stuck in the same spot. While I busy myself thinking on what to believe in, how to believe in, I realise no one else ever said there would be guidelines or definitions. Perhaps the shame thought I’d be able to protect myself if I built some. Loving is a choice, all choices have consequences. You believe in things and sometimes you’ll learn why only afterwards. I’ve obsessed over this idea of ‘close’, ‘best’, failing to realise that in most occasions I had no control or say, I felt it a beat too late, and I felt it all the same, the intensity and the joy of it.
I don’t fully discourage the study of love and believing, but let it come from a place of curiosity rather than insecurity. The later brings much more focus to the questions and not the answers, and yes, the questions will always outweigh the answers, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there either. I think we’re too used, too accustomed to focus on the vacancy, the empty spaces, the burden. I know I am. I say and ask if we are what we believe in and turns out I only believe in all that I lack, in all my faults. Discrediting all my efforts in the face of everything else that I haven’t done, or that I’ve done without ending in an opportune way. I am in love with making myself miserable, and eventually believe that I am miserable. For what? For whose sake? I think of Haim’s line in ‘Home’: When everything felt so wrong, it led me to where I belong.
I heard through a documentary that in Nara, the old capital of Japan, there’s this game, Kingyo-sukui, goldfish scooping. Popular among kids during summer festivals, the fisher must ‘spoon’ the tiny fish inside a tank, one by one using a poi — a round plastic frame with a hand grip made with a special kind of very thin paper, which rips very easily when wet. With too much force, it comes undone. There are even official contests. The owner of a goldfish themed shop says, “It isn't just picking them, we must be sensible with the fish, treat them with care without bothering them. This game trains the heart, for we must be gentle to be able to win.”
On the way home from the cinema, my friends sit side by side behind me. I reach for my earbuds and mp3, only to see that it has no battery (typical). I go the whole ride without music, without picking a distraction. I wonder, or try to. In and out of my head, I catch bits of what they talk about: F shares a song from an underrated artist, oh, turns out E had heard about them. E doesn’t like it when instrumentals get too complicated, I never knew that. When both leave before me, I thank them for today. We make no promises, no future plans. My heart isn’t heavy, for a change.
Being human hurts so much. It’s also insanely beautiful, delicious as fried eggs, and I’d pick life over death time and time again. There is a distance between all things, and some you can cross, others you can dream of closing, most of them you try. You try. It’s in the effort of trying that you get the chance to discover who, what you get to be. A step — a little step — towards not familiarity, but whatever matters. And what is that? Only you will know. You’ll feel it once you do. Your heart will tell you. I cannot promise you when that will happen, or that tomorrow will be kinder. I won’t promise. I’ll just try.
Thank you for your presence, for your time, for this chance you gave me to say something. I hope it was all worth it.
DELICACIES OF THE WEEK
I finally watched Barbie!!!! Not to rub it on your face or anything, but I loved it and, as it is with most things that we love, I found it imperfect (spoilers ahead). The plot was far too focused on battling the non-horse patriarchy, which is understandable when you consider a huge part of the audience was probably children and early teens. Personally I would’ve loved if the themes of existence and what it means to be human were explored even more — the first tears I shed were in the bench scene, when Barbie catches glimpses of normal people in the park: joy, anger, sadness. Barbie asking if she didn’t need permission to exist was a moment that really...echoed… Oh, also one tiny thing that Barbie and I happen to have in common is that we both have a hard time coming up with words to describe what we feel, which is you know, funny, since I do own a newsletter all about emotions and life and all that jazz. Also when she said that crying feels great. Margot and Ryan were perfect for their roles. Great soundtrack (HAIM!!!!), I have to learn the choreo to Dua Lipa’s track. And Push? Too good for a song that promotes misogyny …. (disclaimer, this is a joke).
This is the best video on the internet. These are sounds so relaxing I probably watch this video everyday. Also downloaded it as an audio.
And this was the gif I mentioned.
Lastly I’d like to share with you something from my country. Here this might be one of the most popular songs of the year (and rightfully so). The song has many traces of our traditional sounds, but it holds space for African, Latin and Romani footsteps. It holds no identity but it has a soul. It’s a story of longing for this lady, Maria Joana, that has left, like many other portuguese people that leave, sometimes beyond border, searching for a better future. My mom and I sing it often to each other. She sang it to me at the start of a phone call that ended with me crying. It’s a song that leaves me very happy.
SONGS OF THE WEEK: home by haim , in the mirror by fromis_9 and fast times by sabrina carpenter
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