And then I heard a tale from a man born and raised in Europe, who married a woman, born and raised in Brazil. People noticed, in his behaviour, a substantial change: he started to be more gentle, to demonstrate his love for his wife in public. He, who was so reserved, now is not afraid to show that he cares deeply for the woman he loves.

Upon reflecting about this story, a person pointed out to me how a man used to a certain pattern of ‘this is how I would love you’ can change when he receives a warm good-night kiss before falling asleep, or when he is hugged by his wife just because she wants to show to her husband that he is special to her. See, this isn’t my tale, but it helped me understand why, after almost two long years, I still couldn’t let go of that man who once was my favourite person in the world.

From what I know, he was born and raised in Germany. He is also an Italian citizen, used to go there frequently – don’t know if he does now. His base, though, is in Berlin. I don’t know if it’s true, but I heard that Germany is the country with the population least likely to show their feelings when they are sober. Maybe because of his Italian inheritance, he is a very warm and gentle man (at least he was with me), yet he is a man who lives in Germany. He is used to the way people behave there.

In 2024, when we stopped being friends, Germany became the country that most visits this blog after the States. Every time I open the statistics tab and see that I had a visit from Germany, I imagine it could be him. That maybe he misses our conversations or the comments I used to leave on his Instagram about his work – he is a very talented actor. Germany is a country with 83 million people, certainly he’s not the one visiting me all the time; but in my crazy fantasy, unfortunately, it is him who is constantly stalking me.

Brazilians have many flaws, but the inability to show how much we love the ones we love is not one of them. And after hearing the story of the European man who married the Brazilian woman, and after having me point out the reason why he is changing so much, I understood what my friendship meant to the man I haven’t spoken to in almost two years.

Having a friend who lifts him up, who is always there to give a word of encouragement or to show interest in his interests is maybe something he still doesn’t have – he said that to me once, how I was probably the only person in the world who had seen everything he has ever done. And maybe this is why I didn’t want to let him go out of my heart, I wanted to be there for him because in my head it was the right thing to do.

When I first saw him in an independent movie, I had this strange sensation that I knew him from some place. He was a ‘new actor’, so I couldn’t possibly know him from any TV shows or movies; yet, the sensation was there, pulling me. I started following him without pretension (what was I thinking by following a man that hot?), and somehow we became friends.

You know when you can speak with a person and it’s so easy? When you can talk about anything because a conversation between you two is effortless and unbelievably natural? That is what it felt like with him in the last months of our friendship, and this is another of the reasons why I didn’t want to move on with my life – I was imprisoned in a memory, hoping that, even though we haven’t spoken in so long, maybe one day he would ditch his perfectly slender blond girlfriend and we would eventually cross paths in the street and then live happily ever after.

When I was 13, I met a boy named Marcelo. That was a time of my life filled with horrible memories; dad drank too much, mom was worried because they had no money to pay for someone to watch their newborn child, there were fighting all the time. Marcelo, though, is one of the only happy memories I have from that period. Lewis Howes shared a quote that says ‘when you see something beautiful in someone, tell them. A moment for you could last a lifetime for them’. And this was kind of what Marcelo did – 22 years later and he still holds the master suite of my heart.

Last week I was mentally exhausted because I didn’t know what else to do to get the bloody German/Italian man out of my head. Thursday, too lazy to cook, I forced myself to go to the market to buy ham and a loaf of bread. And out of the blue, while the girl at the counter was cutting my ham, I felt a strange pull to look behind me. Nothing was happening, no movements were calling my attention, I just felt the need to look behind me. And who was there? Marcelo.

He probably doesn’t remember me (it was so long ago!), but just seeing him there, and hearing his gritty voice while the other attendant took his order… I didn’t remember his voice was so beautiful – yes, I do love deep-gritty voices like the ones from Bill Pullman and Patrick Dempsey (thank goodness for testosterone, right?).

Seeing Marcelo there, remembering how much I used to love him (at least for a 13 year-old girl), somehow his memory broke the string that didn’t let me move on with life. I no longer think ‘destiny’ connected me to the friend I had in Germany – maybe it was just a regular old flying dwarf with no better things to do than to elude a lonely and romantic woman.

Anne Rios

amodafala@gmail.com

I took my plants out of their regular place on the balcony to paint the walls, but I haven’t done it. The paint, the brushes, everything is there, waiting for me to make a move, to start the work, and yet here I am, frozen, not doing anything.

The clothes are there, needing to be washed. The dishes are in the sink, an ecosystem of bacteria, the stove is not too dirty because by some miracle I’ve been cleaning it regularly. I make lists, I know what needs to be done, so why do I stay still, looking to nowhere, while hours pass by?

There is an adorable house near my home. On my way to the market, I always stop at the gate to admire it. It’s a simple house with a big iron gate, the yard fits six cars, although there is just one dusty old car, with flat tires which probably belonged to the owner’s husband – it would not be the first case where a widow keeps her husband's car that I see.

The absence of grass on the floor is compensated by the huge trees that throw shadows onto the roof – certainly this house needs no air conditioning. The house has just one floor, and maybe no more than 2 bedrooms, but it blows my mind. Can you imagine an old lady, sweeping the floor before 8 am, singing a song from the 1960s, watering the plants and dusting the fence? – Yes, this house, right close to the entrance door, has a wooden fence.

Black coffee is the one drink I most can’t stand, but I bet this house’s would be the best one I have ever had, aside from a delicious slice of orange cake with a glacé frosting, served in a brown plate made of thick glass, like the kind sold in Brazil when the owners of this house had my age.

What attracts me to this house, I believe, is the promise of what I can’t have. When it’s just you in the world, and you are a woman, you can’t isolate yourself in a house in the back of a big yard. It’s not safe. What if the cable man is dangerous? No one will help you if the guy you hire to fix the washing machine is actually a pervert. And what if you fall in the bathroom, how are you going to ask for help? How are you going to open the gate for the paramedic?

I see that house every time I pass by that street, and I can’t help but wonder how it would be to live there and wake up everyday to let the chickens out and prep the coffee for the five or seven nuggets I never had. Don’t put your career in front of building a family, love. Of what is worth all the money you earn if you don’t have anyone to share it with?

Maybe what is holding me back in my daily chores, deep-deep down, is the absence of a reason for why I am doing it.

Anne Rios

a Brazilian girl writing about Brazilian things

For months, I have been wanting to buy peach jam. Today I did, although I bought it with pain in my heart because of its price – 15 bucks for 230 grams of diabetes. It does taste like peaches, you know, we just need to ignore the fact that the main ingredient of this “delicatessen” is fake sugar – hence, what I had in my hands was fake jam.

I ate it with little loaves of bread called “Bisnaguinha” – they come in a bag that has a bunch of them. A soft and moist bread that undoubtedly is fake too (thank goodness for ultra-processed food?). A nostalgic meal for an almost-sick Brazilian girl with a tendency to live off past memories.

My uterus has already started torturing me for the menstrual cramps of the month, and to that, add my mom’s death anniversary at the end of this week and the leak of a pipe that only God knows how much it will cost me to fix. All I need now is a clogged toilet and I’ll be ready to start my week – no, wait, I got that this very morning (yay).

If things weren’t so difficult with me, I would be a successful businesswoman by now, but maybe the truth is that I do prefer to suffer for a simple glass of jam than to have the money to buy as much jam as I wanted – you can’t sleep 8 hours per day to be pretty and have no worries about your credit card. If only I slept the entire night…

I found out that I have a condition where I wake up every 2 hours to pee. It was never a problem before; unfortunately age thinks differently, and I am exhausted. My solution, since the Brazilian public health system won’t help me, was to figure out by myself how to lower the volume of liquids I ingest during the day – which is working, but it would be working even better if I could quit the amount of sugar I eat in a day.

Anne Rios

a Brazilian girl writing about Brazilian things

Meditation and the art of manifestation have been absent from my life for a few years. I remember being “too tired” to sit down and do the practice – an excuse I repeated day after day somewhere during the pandemic, until abandoning the teachings of Dr. Joe Dispenza for good. It’s not that I don’t believe them, I do. I just wasn’t practising it – maybe I had a moment of weakness in my faith.

But almost two weeks ago, I decided to stop postponing “my comeback” to a day in the future and watch in that very moment an episode (from a podcast?) where Dr. Joe talked about the topic with Lewis Howes – these two are amazing together. After the program, I saved guided meditations and healing frequencies, and for ten minutes, twice a day, I have been focusing my attention to not exactly create the future I want, but to pay attention to where my energy is going and to work on my nonexistent concentration – I have stayed away for too long, sitting down for a full thirty minutes to meditate is not happening anytime soon.

One part of me says it’s nonsense to believe you can have the life you want through the power of your mind, while another part reminds me it’s a matter of faith, not quantum-field-science – of course it would help if Dispenza stopped trying to use scientific experiments to prove that we can manipulate reality. People don’t need science to proof God is real to believe in Him, so why would I need prove that the life of my dreams is just one thought away?

All this attempt to prove only gives an opportunity to those who don’t believe in the “law of attraction” to make fun of us. When the mockery comes from an atheist, I can respect it, but when it comes from people of faith… How can a person who believes that God sent His son to die, and that that son died and resurrected after three days, how come this person does not believe in the impossible?

They call us crazy and lazy, but what about them? What are they? The guardians of the truth? Is their religion the only “right one”, and all the other religions are just the devil playing the fool of humanity?

Maybe Dr. Joe Dispenza is making money off people's faith, but so what? Does that turn the things he says into lies? How many marketing coaches spread the word that if you buy their courses and do exactly what they say, you will make a fortune on social media? The world is full of liars who want to make money off our misery. It's up to us to choose in which bastard we are going to invest our time and energy (and money, why not).

Anne Rios

amodafala@gmail.com

I screwed up again spending R$ 500 on a bed that we couldn’t lift up to my room. I had to return it to Amazon, in the hope that I will receive my money back once they have the bed in their possession – I received the bed within 24 hours, but only God knows when Amazon is going to refund me (it has been almost one week since they collected the bed to send it back). And I am still at the risk of getting a voucher instead of the actual money – what am I going to do with a R$ 500 Amazon voucher? Spend it all on cappuccino?

Worse than buying a bed I didn’t know that came in just one heavy piece (mattress “glued” to the base), was almost deleting my Instagram account this very morning. I know many people say it’s a toxic place, that destroys our brain and makes us waste our entire day with nonsense content, I say that too when I need to give an excuse to why I don’t follow my friends there and to why I don’t post any educational content.

But very deep down, the true is that I loved to think of things to share on my stories, and to think of funny storylines where I could use memes and funny songs; talk to international creators was amazing as well. I even made a French artist friend who gave me a high resolution image of one of her watercolor drawings (I use it as a wallpaper on my phone). Now it’s just a sad place, that reminds me that Instagram was the app I used to talk to my favourite person in the world.

A year and a half ago, I told this man I couldn’t be his friend anymore (for obvious reasons). Nothing changed in my routine with the platform except that he wasn’t there, I wouldn’t hear from him again, I wouldn’t tell him my thoughts on some Dracula movie and wouldn't support his work – something I thought he wouldn’t miss since he had this long-term girlfriend, a person with whom he takes a lot of 'mirror selfies'. I never heard from him again after sending that stupid "break-up" message; curiously, that act of loyalty to his girlfriend made me love him even more, for it shows he respects the woman he is with (he is a keeper, just not mine to keep).

All this jibber-jabber you read above is mostly for me (hello, free therapy). For me to understand why I really don’t want to post cool things on my feed or in my storie. I miss talking to artists I admire, but I don’t want to read their answers, they are not the one I want to talk to. To be honest, I thought things would get easier with time, that I would let go and stop caring about him. Deleting my account was not the answer I was looking for and wouldn’t make things better. And I do need it as a business card for future students (they all search my name on Instagram to see who I am and how my English classes are). I can’t delete it but I don’t need to update it any more either – except for four missing stories I can’t stop thinking about. In January 2024 I started this 30-day song challenge, and until now I haven’t finished it. There is still four songs to complete the challenge; I’m going to publish it now, and hopefully, after the 24 hours, my notification bar will be silenced forever.

Anne Rios

aamodafala@gmail.com