[from my vault — versão em português aqui]

Dear A.,

It is your birthday, and I have known you for almost an entire season. The end of Spring brought you to me, and I caught myself falling for you as the days got longer and the weather changed into unbearable heat. I am miserable when it is hot and humid, but I can’t deny that there is something vibrant about Summer, the thing that makes it so attractive to writers of songs, movies and TV shows, when they want to talk about young love.

The two of us, however, are not that young anymore (thank goodness). I say it with a smile and a giggle because we have not lived for long enough to call ourselves old by any measure, but we have lived long enough to have trespassed many of the things that weighed us down when we were innocent. Becoming an adult is playing games with time, figuring out how it is possible that sometimes it flies, and sometimes it drags, always against our wishes, always against how we feel about the things that we are experiencing at a certain point. How do we get over how strange it is to exist, to be anything at all?

Perhaps the problem is that our imagination is completely infected with movie-like scenarios of what the movements of life should look like. Fall, crisis, passion, despair and hunger are always more interesting through cinematographic lenses, where the hearts, aspirations and expectations needn’t be broken, only shattered for a minute, for as long as the scene lasts. Maybe it has something to do with the possibility of skipping parts or turning off the screen. But, as much as I hate sitting with the discomfort of living through things I would rather observe and write about, my sense of wonder keeps me on the verge of transcendence whenever I think too much about the assortment of improbabilities that have come together to weave the fabric of our reality as it is.

Feelings, for all their fleetingness, are something beautiful in how they come to exist. I could write hundreds of journal entries to put my thoughts into place, and figure out what makes me want to talk to you every single day since the day I talked to you for the first time. Since it’s your birthday, I just wanted to find the right way to put into words the rush of joy that I get when I think about you, and the little moments we get to spend together, doing our silly little tasks and jumping through an assortment of random topics, for no other reason besides the fun of sharing ideas with someone who is eager to hear them, and respond.

I am assured that there is beauty and glory in the slightest grain of dust, but I am also convinced that something more valuable is hiding in the parts still unknown, in the unexplored depths, the place where all the things our body, mind and heart cannot understand go. I want to find these treasures with you. It is a cliché to talk about the small but certain happiness, but I cannot help it. And maybe this is the hope that I entertain, when I keep myself sensitive to all of the smallest things that come my way, oscillating between highs and lows just to make sure that I have truly met the limits of myself. It is tiring, but it’s movement that has made us who we are; I am a lot of things, some are better than others, but all of them have come together today to try to tell you that I care immensely about you, and I am glad the assortment of improbabilities that make up reality have come together to bring us together.

Maybe it is crazy luck, maybe it is fate. Maybe Annie Ernaux was right, and it is a form of luxury, to live out a passion for another person. Maybe one day we will realise it was a mishap that we should have foreseen. They say it takes all four seasons to start to get to know someone; this Summer, too, will pass, like all Summers did before, the leaves will turn yellow and begin to fall. But, right now, the Sun is still hot and burning, and our honey skin is glimmering, brighter than ever. You don’t smile often but I like the way you light up when you do. I like the way we glow under the clear day sky, when the monsoon is gone. Maybe being golden together is our treasure.

Please, be happy for a long time. And let’s do it together, for as long as we can.

Happy Birthday to you, from me.

J.

Photo by Lucas K on Unsplash