The original text was written by Ruth Manus in Portuguese
(click here to check it out: goo.gl/sweCuY) and I
decided to do an English version, so I could share it with my wandering friends
that is passing or have passed through the same moment.
Fly: eternal envy and
frustration that man carries in his chest every time he sees a bird in the sky.
We learn to do a million things, but flying... Flying life does not let us do.
Perhaps by knowing that we humans learn to belong too much to places and people.
And in this case, being able to fly would cause crisis hard to bear, among the
temptation to go and need to stay.
Very well. Then the man kept going and created the
wheel. The Kombi. The scooter. The Harley. The Boeing 737. And we found that
even without wings could fly. But the big trouble comes when we realized he
could go with no date to return.
And so they began to emerge the brave ones who left
their cities of hunger and misery to try to feed the family in the capital,
full of opportunities and monsters. The brave who left the comfort of home to
study and dream about the incredible and hypothetical future that waits them.
The brave who left theirs loved cities to live opportunities that do not appear
twice. The brave ones who have left, at last, the life they had in their hand
to fly to lives that have decided to face head-on.
The lives of those who decided to fly are
paradoxical, every day. It is the eternally divided chest. It’s crying for
wishing to be there, while wanting to be here. It’s leave heaven and hell in
the farewell, the nightmare and the dream in permanence. It’s being proud of
the choice that offered you a thousand treasures and hates the same choice that
you subtracted thousand other precious stones.
And we start living a classic script: lie in bed,
thinking about the old-eternal home, in kilometers away, thinking of loved
ones, what they are doing without you, the laughs you did not laugh, the
hassles that you were not there to help. It’s trying unsuccessfully to contain
a tear to drop and sigh knowing that it’s solely responsible for the own
choice. The next day when you wake up, everything's fine, the chosen life all
around you make sense again. But
you know other nights like that will come.
But will we learn? To be sick without someone to
care, to smell the food with eyes, turning empty apartments in our house,
turn colleagues into friends, pain into resistance, sharp miss in everyday
faults?
Will we learn? Being son by distance, to love
through Skype, watching children grow up in videos, pretending the table of the
bar can be replaced by whatsapp groups, be friends through characters instead
of hugs, laughing loudly with HAHAHAHA, to swallow the tear and keep going?
Does life will always be this fate, on either side
of where we are? We will be here wondering if we should be there and vice
versa? Is it a test? An option? courage or karma? Will we ever know, after
all, if we are in the right place? Is there, at long last, a certain place to live that life that is a whirlwind of uncertainty and we insist on pretend that we believe having the control? I know it's not easy. And I admire those who
have faced and face all this, every day.
Who let Vitória da Conquista, São Jose
do Rio Preto, Florianópolis, Juiz de Fora, Recife, Sorocaba, Cuiabá or Paris to
build a life in São Paulo. Who left São Paulo to go to Rio to Brasilia,
Dublin, New York, Aix-en-provence, Brisbane, Lisbon. Who left Bolivia, Colombia
or Haiti to try to live in Brazil. Who exchanged Portugal for Italy, Italy for
France, France for Emirates. Who let the Senegal or Morocco to try to be happy
in France. Who left Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde to live in Portugal. For
the ones that try, that struggle. For the ones that go.
The price is high. We wonder, we are guilty, we
grieves. But fate, life and the our chest sometimes ask us to shipment. Some
will not. But we, we were, and we will come, we are not free from fear and so
many weaknesses. But we are forever free from fear we have never tried. Keep walking.