birthday

ouro de tolo [um feliz aniversário]

25 April, 2024 — 1 Comment

[do fundo do baú — english version here]

Querida A.,

É seu aniversário, e eu já te conheço há quase uma estação inteira. O fim da Primavera te trouxe para mim, e eu me deixei levar por você junto com a chuva das monções. Meu humor azeda com os dias quentes e úmidos, mas eu reconheço o charme vibrante do Verão, aquilo sobre o que falam os poetas, quando escrevem sobre ser jovem e estar apaixonado.

Mas nós dois não somos exatamente jovens, né? E graças a Deus, porque tem graça mesmo. Não vivemos o bastante ainda pra dizer que somos velhos, mas já vivemos o suficiente para navegar com alguma habilidade as coisas que nos agonizavam quando éramos inocentes. Crescer é jogar dados com o tempo, perder-se um pouco tentando descobrir como é possível que às vezes ele voe, e que às vezes ele se arraste, sempre contrário às nossas vontades, ao que sentimos no momento em que tomamos consciência de que ele está passando. Será que é possível superar o drama e o estranhamento de se descobrir existindo, existente?

Talvez o problema seja que nossa imaginação da vida foi moldada pela narratividade dos filmes, de como a vida deveria ser. Queda, crise, paixão, desespero, fome, tudo sempre parece mais interessante pela lente cinematográfica, onde os corações, aspirações e expectativas só se quebram enquanto a história está sendo contada. Talvez tenha algo a ver com a possibilidade de pular partes, ou desligar a TV quando se quer. Mas, por mais que eu odeie viver com o desconforto de passar pelas coisas que soam melhores na minha imaginação, ou nos textos que eu escreveria a respeito, meu senso de encantamento com a vida me faz flutuar um pouquinho toda vez em que penso demais sobre todas as improbabilidades que trabalham juntas para tecer a realidade, do jeito que ela é.

Sentimentos, tão efêmeros, tão fugazes, tem uma beleza singular, na forma como nascem e florescem. Eu poderia escrever centenas de textos para tentar organizar meu pensamentos, e descobrir o que exatamente faz com que eu queira conversar com você todos os dias, desde a primeira vez em que conversei com você. Talvez porque seja seu aniversário, e eu queira muito que você saiba como me faz feliz pensar em você, e todas as coisas pequenas que nós fazemos juntos, e nossas conversas meio estúpidas, as voltas que damos em torno de milhares de assuntos diferentes, sem propósito ou destino, só porque é tão bom ter algo para dizer, e ter alguém que queira escutar.

Eu tenho certeza que existe beleza e glória nos menores grãos de poeira, mas também estou convencido de que existe algo de mais valioso escondido nas partes desconhecidas, nas profundezas inexploradas, nos lugares para onde vão as coisas que nosso corpo, mente e coração não conseguem compreender. Quero encontrar esses tesouros com você. É um clichê falar da alegria das coisas pequenas, mas acho que essa é a esperança que me mantém seguindo em frente, que me mantém sensível à todas as menores coisas que vem ao meu encontro, oscilando entre altos e baixos apenas para ter certeza de que já passei por todos os limites de mim mesmo. É cansativo, mas é esse movimento que nos fez quem somos; eu sou várias coisas, algumas são melhores que outras, mas todas se reúnem aqui hoje para tentar te dizer que eu me importo imensamente com você, e sou muito grato por todas as improbabilidades que tecem a realidade, e teceram eu e você aqui hoje. 

Talvez seja muita sorte, talvez seja destino. Talvez Annie Ernaux estivesse certa, e é uma forma de luxo, viver uma paixão por outra pessoa. Talvez um dia nós descobriremos que foi um erro enorme, que não conseguimos prever. Dizem que são necessárias pelo menos quatro estações para começar a conhecer uma pessoa; esse Verão vai passar em breve, assim como todos os Verões que vieram antes, e vai chegar o tempo de que as folhas caiam novamente. Mas, agora, o Sol continua queimando, e nossa pele dourada está mais brilhante do que nunca. Você não sorri com frequência, mas gosto como você é capaz de iluminar o ambiente quando o faz. Gosto de queimar e reluzir ao Sol com você. Talvez seja um ouro de tolo, mas é um tesouro só nosso.

Desejo que você seja feliz por muito tempo. E que seja feliz comigo.

Feliz aniversário para você. 

J.

we are golden [a birthday wish]

25 April, 2024 — 1 Comment

[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 wanted 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

“30 of 28”, or “the life I never knew I’d have”

28 March, 2023 — Leave a comment

Versão em Português.

10 years ago, a month after turning 18 years of age, I published a text on this blog, called “‘30 of 18’, or ‘why I’m disappointed with myself’” (not translated). It’s a frustrated account of everything I expected to become before I turned 18, and how I felt at the time about not having accomplished any of that. I’m pretty sure I had just watched a clip of a brilliant young boy, around 13 years of age, which reminded me that I was no longer a teenager, too much of a grown up to keep sustaining my single personality trait as a try-hard brilliant young girl.

My belated 28th birthday playlist.

I cringe with profound embarrassment whenever I reread that text — not without feeling some compassion for 18-year-and-1-month-old Luisa, who still felt extremely lonely, lost and misunderstood most of the time. And I admit that I find the “response” I wrote four years later, “‘30 of 22’, or ‘why I am no longer disappointed with myself’”, even worse. 18-year-old Luisa wrote with the heartfelt frustration of someone whose dreams and plans had all failed, but 22-year-old Luisa wrote with the confidence of someone who thought she’d just cornered the Lord, and snatched from His hands the textbook of Eternity. The Luisa of early 2017 would go on to have a meltdown once she learned that all of that confidence about the future that had been holding her together would also break apart. Even worse — six years later, we are still working to erase the remains of all the hurt we got from the future we thought we were building and working towards. 

It was only recently — literally a few weeks ago — that the penny dropped: all of these years, I had been going on as if I was living the wrong life, completely incapable of truly embracing the life I had been given, the life that I hadn’t anticipated, that I hadn’t expected to get. It was a difficult conclusion to get to, but surprisingly easy to forgive. I look around, and I get it; I get it that people might simply find themselves stuck in ideal ideas about life, about others, about everything, because time goes by so quickly, and we can’t afford to pay attention to every single corner of our cortex, and it’s precisely in these little dark corners that dangerous thoughts take root and grow quietly. No amount of coaches, therapists, counsellors, assistants, juice-cleanse-influencers and all would be enough to handle all of the hidden, unseen depths of one’s soul. Getting lost in yourself is so, so easy. 

I came across a funny little sentence a few weeks ago, as I read a paper — “One might hope that 20 years of research would enhance the credibility of some theories and reduce that of others. But this does not seem to have happened”[1]. I giggled, thinking about everything I thought I would have learned by the time I turned 28. One might have hoped that 10 years of adult life would have helped me figure out my biggest issues, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. On the contrary, I seem to have gotten myself plenty of new challenges — the unseens depths, you know. Life kept happening even as I tried to clean the house; the wind brought dust through the cracks, the soles of my shoes are full of mud, the clothes I put on and take off cover the ground in feathers, and rain comes in through the window if I leave it open by accident. 

One of the few remaining pictures of my 18th birthday party, in the 24-hour study room of the Architecture building (RIP my hacked Facebook account) + the only picture I have from my 22nd birthday, having dinner with my family, from my sister’s instagram stories + a picture of the little celebration I got at KAIST Church, the Sunday after my birthday. The most important thing about these pictures is that, on the first and second ones, I could still eat gluten; on the third one, my lovely friends got me rice flour scones to wish me a happy birthday.

The biggest challenge, as I turn 28, is reconciling the different parts of me. It’s sure to be a long way, but I can’t afford not to believe that, one day, all of my thoughts, feelings and actions can get as close as possible to coming together in here, now. Though I must say, reflecting about the person I am today is quite amusing, especially considering how both Luisas — the 18-year-old one, and the 22-year old one — would have never imagined that, in the month of March when we turned 28, instead of the rainy end of Summer, we witnessed as Winter turned into a beautiful, albeit cold, early Spring, covered in cherry blossoms. I feel particularly about the me of ten years ago, who thought her time to go live out her dreams was already up (how innocent), because she would be the most surprised about what we do these days. Even so, accomplishing dreams and feeling successful is not what this text is about — achievements would be too shallow of a measure of everything that changed within me throughout this decade. Being human is something of a loud, dramatic experience of living every single day for the first, last, only time, and amassing way too many years before you can tell how many are too many, or too little. Wherever I turned out to be, in this big year of 2023, the only thing I would have liked to have accomplished would have been the same heart, going after the same things, pursuing the same goals.

There’s this thought that has the power of eating up all of my energy to keep going, which is the idea of how many more frustrations still remain for me to endure, as I keep walking down my path. Wondering if there’s another pandemic coming, or one more great war, or if technology will have finally gone too far, and contemporary society will finally self-implode, just as I was trying to find the perfect work-life balance. You never can tell. The only medicine seems to be a resolution to live slow and steady. Figuring out how to get my head somewhere I can make plans without trying to outsmart God, and how to find myself across the multiple juxtapositions of time and space that have made me who I am, with the assurance that there’s still a great deal of change awaiting. That’s all I can do — trying to live wisely, working, little by little, towards eventually getting there, sooner or later. I want to find contentment that doesn’t depend on the illusion of having control over my fate. I want to live with a little more peace today.

My official song for this birthday. There’s a lot of longing, but some good hope, going around these days.

[1] One might hope that 20 years of research would enhance the credibility of some theories and reduce that of others. But this does not seem to have happened, partly for a reason rarely discussed: researchers regularly describe their conclusions in terms too vague to be very useful. (p. 30).

Burstein, P. (2003). The Impact of Public Opinion on Public Policy: A Review and an Agenda. Political Research Quarterly, 56(1), 29–40. https://doi.org/10.2307/3219881

Photo by Carolina on Unsplash