Scenes from March and April at home.

Winter scares and fascinates me at the same time. I fear the overwhelming silence, especially when I'm out in the streets alone (I feel more vulnerable then, stripped of anything that is unique and personal; it's as if the silence could swallow me without warning). Winter brings things back to their innermost selves - it's a season with zero fanfare. Surviving it takes a lot of deep breathing and a lot of letting go. I come from a tropical land when a flower is a flower all year round; Christmas turns into Carnaval turns into June festivities turns into October Holidays, the sun burning our faces all the while - there's no time or space for introspection, on weekends we used to drive 3 hours by car each way just to be in a silent country house, but being such a social people we'd take at least 10 friends to the getaway and have a barbecue. Not even my bedroom was silent - on the hottest days I would sleep with the sound of at least 3 different TVs coming in through the open window.

Winter in the north is like an interminable dive into deep, dark waters. What scares me most is that I never seem to come out of it feeling the same.

Mary Oliver's love letter to one dog can well be read as a love letter to all dogs. It seems to whisper that we should give our attention to all animals, really, and with attention comes love. It makes me think of Athena, maybe not because Percy reminds me of her (although he does a little, is that too outrageous to suggest?), but because the love and devotion that comes from it feels pretty much the same. January 2023 pops out of the map of time like a peak, fixed, unalterable, impossible to repeat. Sometimes it looks very bleak, sometimes bright and warm. We keep moving further and further away from it, but there it stands, like a marking flag, never to be forgotten (a pain I can't quite feel but can't get rid of either): this was your last month with Athena. And here she died.

She, too, is a continual blessing.

Home to the quietest, humblest yet most extraordinary of dreams.

December in Portugal

“Like a bridge over troubled water”

“Bacalhau”, this rather unassuming fish, is one of the subjects you talk about with most passion - especially in respect to how it shouldn't be done. It's been 6 years and, despite my total control of everything that has to do with the kitchen, I haven't yet managed to cook it in a tomato sauce as I've intended to. You look insulted whenever I try to add it to the menu, and then I'm reminded that you are Portuguese. I love you the most for it - for being made of so many elements that I was not there to live or witness and quite frankly can't even make sense of, but end up filling the voids in my life anyways. I love you for being all those things that I am not, and for having lived most of your life in a world that, no matter what, still feels a bit alien to me. It's like having front row seat to a foreign-language play.