It has been almost six months (less three days) since I landed in Salvador da Bahia, on the last direct flight from Lisbon. I’m essay writing and only as I put the letters together it hits me: it’s half a year. It’s half a year, damn it!
The meetings I had days before the decreed pandemic that pushed me in advance to a plane disappeared as if they had never happened. Long-term plans have dissolved like cotton candy, melted by a virus that looks like saliva in sugar. But looking with today’s eyes this is very little or nothing relevant. Fortunately, very fortunately, this virus never knocked a door closed to me. It spared me of what, I can imagine, is as painful as it can be in terms of a goodbye: absence. Thousands (millions?) died alone. Without a last kiss of comfort, an affectionate handshake, a party, an “see you soon” or “rest in peace”. Just thinking about this hurts. And yet, we’ve learned, we had to learn because the alternative was to become insane, to live with news of a thousand deaths a day, until we reach, here in Brazil, the absurd number of more than 132 thousand lives lost.
Living in a bubble of privilege of those who not only did not have to leave their homes to survive, but could still enjoy from the global slowdown, the days were coming together in phases. The discovery of a new life, with time for supposedly everything but made so many times of almost nothing done. Several old projects died and new ones took time to be born. In this phase of reconstruction, the days turned over in months. For weeks just sofa. Internet, Internet and Internet.
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