quem é só de um lugar é pobre porque nenhum lugar é inteiro.

Valter Hugo Mãe

1 Going Home (Twice)

1.1 I’m Going Home, Home Is Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

One of the things I miss the most, and that I rarely think about, are the layers of greens from different species of plants. A visual effect that only tropical countries allow, the lushness of multiple shades of the same color surrounding you like it would eat you alive if it could. I miss the heat, the mix of humid heat and the slow breeze from the sea, laying down under an umbrella on the sand, just with my feet out of the shade, the perfect balance between warmth and coolness – the perfect weather if such a thing existed in a sensation. My husband misses the rain, the blinding curtain of water that comes down over these tropical lands. He misses the continuous wind that comes from the sea when we drive with the window down. This is home for us.

But what is home when you haven’t been there in years? When your children don’t speak your language and when they pronounce their names in a manner completely different from you, like the parents we see now at the airport, struggling to teach their kids who is who from their own blood. The children don’t recognize who you are in this land, and the people who made you, they see nothing of you in these strangers.

It breaks my heart when my old friends explain their lives to me. I realize I have been left out of so much, the basic stuff. The kind of thing you only share with someone when you run into them by chance on the street. Little life snapshots, like – oh! I sold my car, or I started exercising. Since I left, everything changed; I must tell them though that I still understand very well, because half a decade can change nothing.

I miss home because home is who I am, but when I’m there, I know exactly why I left. Do we all walk away trying to bring peace to our souls? And if we don’t find what we are looking for, would we be able to recognize it or do we stay away out of spite?

The amount of energy necessary to live at home was what pushed me away, and now life here seems to be even more demanding. People are scared, they feel unsafe. A wave of guilt inundates me – perhaps this is the price I must pay for leaving it all behind. Politics is a mess, that’s why people are so angry, and this angst and anxiety comes through in the decibel levels and tone when they speak with each other. It’s displayed when they can’t wait for other people to jump in the elevator, everyone needs to try to get inside at the same time, as if not moving fast would make them lose the contest. You take what you can, and don’t allow others to take what is yours, there is not enough for everyone. I missed the elevator, the crowd swamped me, they shot me dirty looks.

Do I still belong? Especially when I feel myself cringe because people seem too warm, and they touch me when they speak, even though we just met, even in this insane pandemic during which I was so glad I was not here.

What does it mean when I have to reach out to my new language to fill the gaps when I’m home, because I began to forget my mother tongue? When my brain insists on automatically saying hi and thank you when what I really mean is oi and obrigada. I speak broken English and broken Portuguese, unable to claim any language as fully my own.

But it doesn’t take long for me to go back to the flow of my old life, things come back to me naturally, I don’t even realize it’s happening. It begins to feel like I never left, like I went away for a short vacation. In the pictures, it seems this scenery favors me, I look prettier - people comment. Is this because I am happier within my old life?

People believe that the hardest thing to leave behind is family and friends - the people you love the most. But if you are from Rio, you need to add the city to this equation too, this untamed, misbehaved, incomprehensible, gorgeous place. The busyness of the city, the many scents and smells that invade my nostrils, the dirty sand on the beach, the never-ending noise, the uncurbed smiles and sonorous laughs – samba - this is me; this is what I miss.

I even walk differently here, people from Rio have their own way of walking, we do it like we are dancing, there is a very famous song about it. The Girl from Ipanema never plays in my head, it’s for gringos when they come here, flip-flops on the ground, things are different. The buzz of the vendors on the beach, I love this, bodies uncovered, all sizes and shapes.

I see a boy who doesn’t seem to be over five years of age, selling candy on the beach. It’s such a hot day. This place - you can never be at peace. At what age do we learn to look away? We avoid glancing for too long, not that we don’t care, but we also need to survive in this city. Someone asks how old the boy is, says he shouldn’t be working, he already knows how to dodge this type of questions, there is no ‘shouldn’t’ in his life, or in the lives of others like him, there is not much choice. I look away and go into the water.

The thing I miss the most is to open my eyes under water, when it’s green is lighter and you can see far, when the tide is high and there is at least a metre of water above and below you, it feels like the sea is yours and you are his. Everything is perfect as is.

1.2 Neither Here or There

In my early twenties I called home crying. It was my first time flying away, first time not in a hotel, but in my own space, with a routine. I truly believe that it is a structure to your day, such as cleaning your house or going to work, that determines if you are actually capable of building a new life. That you are truly settled in a new place. This was still a time when we could stop at phone booths in the middle of the street. Manhattan buzzed around me while I cried. No one saw, no one cared.

My mother picked up the phone and understood right away. She pointed out that I had made choices, and that I would have to live with them. I chose to move away, there were consequences to that. She hung up. She dried my tears, and I walked the dirty streets of Midtown. New York is the place one can feel most alone in a crowd and that’s exactly what I was looking for. We all have our own reasons to walk away from the worlds we know best.

Although we never spoke of this again, when the story came back years later, my mother told me how hard it was for her to cut me off, to let me go. But she had to, I was fine, and the most generous thing she could have done was to set me free to be who I wanted to be. This is why I leave, it’s because I know I have roots. My freedom comes from the understanding that I have a place to go back to, always.

My mother is my port of permanence, and that’s the place I always return to. But when I have news, I call my father first. He was the one who sent me away. He said the world is limitless, and mine to take and keep. He said it was ok to be an explorer, to always want more. I think he regrets this; he cried the last time I left; it was the first time he did so. Now, it’s too late anyway, I’ve already expanded.

To distance oneself from one’s birthplace may encompass the understanding that one’s comfort zone lies in a distant home. To believe this is to give yourself the chance to constantly redefine who you are. There is often a wrong perception that the resilience we carry inside ourselves as migrants is due to some negative experiences we had where we came from, and this justifies the hardships we endure in the new places we choose to call home. That a propelling force sent us away, and this needing to be away makes us endure. But the truth could also simply be that we moved away from what we knew, just for the sake of the search. Full of hopes and dreams, trusting what was to come.

The unexpected part of this journey is that it’s a cyclical one. I leave, but I remain. I move forward while part of me stays behind. There is a need to divide oneself in multiple realities and exist in all of them at the same time. I thought that away was a place, but my place is now neither here nor there. I live in suspension. Is it even possible to do this? To try to land in a new life while not letting go of the old one? To remain in one place while choosing to be at another?

Language is the most in-between space that I inhabit in my new life. If you hear me speaking on the street, you’ll probably be able to guess what I’m talking about. I insert English words into my Portuguese to give meaning to things that I only experience in my new life. I bend the rules of grammar creating verbs in Portuguese from English expressions. Couch is in Portuguese, throw is in English. Tomilho and rosemary. Pratos na dishwasher.

I am of the opinion that language, as a nonphysical thing, is what better carries the feeling of either belonging too much, because you have more than one place to call home, or not belonging anywhere as this amalgam of different languages intertwined amounts to no certain idiom. How much of one place can I be when the first thing I start to lose, as soon as the background changes, is the ability to use languages that I gained, to lose this form of expressing myself I worked so hard to tame.

At first, I learned different languages to make my world bigger. But now, when I’m home, my first home, I only read books in Portuguese, I crave books about Brasil. I want to read about people with burned skins that believe in African gods and celebrate Christmas during summer. I want to hear the sound of my mother tongue, imposed on us by people from a place I have never been to. At home, I know English will never be enough. But when I return to Canada, it’s hard to keep up with all the pages I bring with me. Truth is, I lose interest, or my interest moves somewhere else together with my body. Now my appetite goes towards the realities that I witness in these northwestern lands. Now, I seem to be looking for grounding wherever I am, to use language to look inward. To understand and hold on tightly to the place I am at, instead of looking outside like I did before.

I could have stayed; I chose the unknown and it didn’t have a fixed address before I landed here. I could not anticipate that the fog and the rain, the dark green forest, the smell of firewood in fall would make this place home. We are here for now, we choose to stay, we may choose to move away again, now leaving two homes behind.

Once you have uprooted yourself, it is much easier to do it over and over again. You’re no longer bound to the ground that made you. You’re now from many places, and the richness and multiplicity you collected on the way gives you freedom. It gives you the lived understanding that borders and nations are a social and historical construct and that humans transcend that.

1.3 I’m Going Home, Home Is Vancouver, Canada

I cried when I left but felt relieved when I arrived. Flying over Vancouver, the clouds look like they have been knitted together, showing uneven stitches similar to the ones only I am capable of making. Knitting is one of the habits I picked up in my new life, and it’s one I adore, but it only belongs in this North American version of my life.

I need to make space inside me for my new life, like the dishes I now like and cook, the books that I surround myself with, that make me feel at home. This home I created is filled with colours from my old life, to show I have roots, the walls of my home are covered with art that tells the world who I am. My husband is my country and my friends my mother tongue, they talk just like me. More than ever it’s important that I talk like this, exchanging the s for x, singing while speaking our Portuguese from Rio. There is also my other language, the language I adopted, that is now better fitted to express these new experiences than my native one. Because now I live in English too, in-between. My world is larger, and it is reasonable for me to need more language to be able to take care of this growth.

My old language is inserted everywhere in my new life, it gets mixed, just like the rest of me. I bring my beach habits to the lake. I incorporate Canadian ways of doing things that now make a lot of sense to me. I bend my language; I mix things enriching my surroundings with more meaning. Every now and then I change the way I pronounce my name, it’s not ideal, I actually hate it, but life is just easier this way. Sometimes you just need to let it go.

I’m back home in Vancouver now, and I enjoy this new slow life, the politeness of people who give me good morning on the seawall and the level of trust (although sometimes I wish people were more caring), and Thanksgiving food. My world grew, the number of things I love too.

I look forward to my morning run at the park. I miss my trees, that’s how I refer to the conifers at Stanley Park. I miss their scent, and I miss their silent company. I miss the change of the seasons, and the smile I have on my face when I see the leaves turn. If I can give one reason why I live in North America, of all things, it’s the fall, the foliage is what makes me happier. The change of colors, the yellows, oranges and reds that light up the forest.

One of the things I deem most important for one’s sense of belonging is to understand the nature that surrounds you. I’m no expert, but I feel that I belong when I know I can try to survive if left alone in nature. I would probably not survive in the Amazon back home, but I know a few tricks I could try. And I’ve learned them here too. What you can eat, which tree is which and how they operate. The animals I may find and their behavior with humans. Feeling comfortable in nature goes beyond survival as it is one of the gates locals try to keep tightly closed. We’re animals after all, and we trust and protect our own habitats. I see the kids up on the trails at such an early age, I know I’ll never be like them. There are not enough books in the world that will teach me the experiences you pick up during childhood explorations. Like the ones I have had on the beach waves. But you can recognize the land you’re in, acknowledge it and try to be a respectful guest here. This will empower you. Nature is welcoming. Maybe that’s all an outsider needs every now and then. Just to feel like another being, no different from others.

Nature allows you freedom of movement but with constraints beyond human control, beyond borders and governmental oversight. Just like it does with other species, although birds, like humans, like to defy that. They might even show you that it’s ok to live in this in-between life, just like they do. To belong to two places at the same time. Just like me, they love summer and travel to find it. Do they feel like they are going back home when they fly south?

The little bird I fell in love with during one of my explorations of the islands that surround Vancouver, with his tall legs and long beak, happened to be the same creature I found in the northeast of Brazil six months later. Did we cross paths in the air? How lucky are we, to have two places to run away to, and to run away from.

I want to be everywhere and experience everything at the same time. Now that I made home here, the feeling that it’s time to move on is arising in me again. Unlike birds, I can change the direction of my migratory flights. The sound of the wind is pointing to a new direction, new possibilities to follow and new ways of life to pursue. I’m divided in two, each half separated by 111225.83 km. I never want to become whole again.

This is for Edna who showed me that you can be from two places, even if you don’t know where they are, and that’s ok.