Growth, If Nothing Else

On "location” as Vincent Van Gogh during the making of an upcoming film project

Sitting at my writing desk in Portland, Oregon, here, in the now, and looking out my window, there is a row of houses that sit directly across the street. Their architecture is distinctly American, and they are enveloped by an inexplicable ray of sunshine—around this time in Portland, one usually expects grayish, silvery days with winds that cut, and a balm that makes you shiver. I can vaguely recall weather this cold. It was here, right here in Portland, right before I left for Brazil. That was five years ago, almost to the day.

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The day here is inching towards golden hour, it’s around 4 in the afternoon. Back in Brazil, it is around 10pm and I assume my wife may be in our apartment getting ready for bed, or reading, or doing god knows what. I have no idea, truthfully. I don’t keep up with her much these days—she’s finally decided on a divorce, and so we will do the paperwork and dissolve the marriage by proxy. Well, no problem there. I have not heard her voice since the very last night at the airport, all the way back in early November. That’s life!

The question has often come since my arrival back in America—what have I brought back with me? What have I imported?

Brazil, in its sun-drenched charm, is a bit of a fever dream. I pluck memories from within it that are so old, I even remembered them long ago while still there. As if the whole of it were a book, my mind is strangely drawn to the early days, the story’s earliest chapters. I remember how door knobs turned and felt in my hand, how the air smelled when the day was surely headed for a downpour, the gliding and striping of fresh paint for a new home, for a new life, in a new country, with a wife I had newly married. Well, some things just don’t last as long as you think they will.

What have I brought back with me? What have I imported?

I could not count the former selves I must have woven through in that open country. From the countryside, where nothing at all seems to have been built, and plenty of smiling faces, to the harsh São Paulo reality—where there is hardly room for anything more, and a smile from anyone is largely received with suspicion. Still, in these many selves, is the love of my wife, and too, her former selves and all their weaving as well. São Paulo and its streets, which are menacing and shadowy, had the means to cut through a marriage—any crack would be stressed to its fatal breaking point, its final conclusion.

The layers of that big green country are tattooed upon my spirit, let’s say. The state of Minas Gerais has a big hand in that. In Minas, it is as though everyone should spend their life outside in the heat, right out in the sun. That quite suited me then. Even having lived a decade in California, I don’t believe I have ever seen so much sun or felt so much heat pounding down from such a gigantic sky.

Everywhere there is a lesson. Everywhere one looks there is a former self that has withered and died. And so there is a crepiscule, something like a museum you make for yourself, in order to preserve what is perhaps only a carcass, whose lessons and trials have been exported and blasted unto the surface of another life, a whole new set of circumstances, whose new appeals wain and waver at every step forward—and still there is celebration.

Still, there is no cause to worry or break. There is nothing to break. Nothing that can shake you anymore than you already have been shaken. Fear comes on, but is shaken off with a grin. Fear is something silly—at least in this chapter—while you ruminate on your current condition. The novelty of your situation is a necessary buffer, which gives birth to a new ambition, a new will to live a new life, a new understanding of all that and no understanding of what it entails.

And what do we import from experiences that cause us to think in these terms? I could not think like this, nor write like this everyday if I tried. I have no need to think this densely on anything, no real desire to do it. What do we import from a land, a land which has returned to a state of fiction, a fantasy, that is to say a memory?

So, that big green country cradled me for a bit. Nurtured me for a while. I must be grateful for that, for a marriage, for the love that came and went. I can bring back with me a feast of emotions. I have yet to put them to use. They crowd around me, they come and they go as new memories take their place. I am racking up new memories here in Portland as I speak. I have imported little of myself yet. But if nothing, there is growth and movement, chaos and endurance, love and gratitude. I will write to Brazil again, I am sure. But for now I say muito obrigado!

I have every intention of returning. I have no idea when.

Até a próxima

JSV
2026

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