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