![[Brazil_Reflections_Part_12.mp3]] # Last Morning in Ubatuba I woke up in Ubatuba again with that same awareness I had been carrying all trip: this is temporary, so pay attention while it is here. Natalia and Daniel had already left that morning. Saying goodbye was quick, but it stayed with me more than I expected. Their time with us had gone fast enough that it felt unfinished, and I caught myself wanting just one more ordinary hour with them. Not a big moment. Just more time. It felt like an ellipsis instead of a period, but I still felt the space where they had been. I had no idea when I would see them again, and that uncertainty pressed lightly on me. I trusted there would be a next time, but trust does not remove the ache entirely. That mix of light sadness and trust became the emotional baseline of the day. ## A Small Beach, A Tight Parking Spot We drove to a beach bar through a neighborhood of narrow streets, parked in paid parking, and squeezed into one of those spots that only works because everyone agrees to be precise. On the passenger side, there was a knee-high fence so close to the door that I could not open it. I saw it coming. I could have told Laio to stop a little earlier and let me out before he pulled in. I didn’t. Part of me didn’t want to interrupt the flow. Part of me just watched it happen. Instead, I waited, then climbed out the window. It was easy. It was a little ridiculous. It was fun. Laio looked genuinely confused and asked why I had not just asked to be let out earlier. I told him I thought climbing out would be funny. That was true. But it was also a small refusal to optimize everything. I spend a lot of my life looking for the efficient move, the cleanest path, the correct adjustment. In that moment, I didn’t want the correct adjustment. I wanted the version that made us laugh. It felt childlike in a good way. Not careless, just playful. A tiny decision that made the moment lighter, and maybe reminded me that not every friction point needs to be solved. The beach bar itself sat right on the sand with small tables, lawn chairs, and umbrellas packed tightly enough that it almost looked like the seating area had become the beach. The stretch of sand felt compact compared to what I grew up with in Southern California. In my memory, the section we were on was maybe a couple miles long, and perhaps a couple hundred feet from jungle edge to water. Back home, I am used to beaches that feel much deeper and broader, where the distance between street and surf can feel enormous. That contrast made this beach feel intimate. Compressed. Like everything was happening in one frame. Raphael was watching the F1 race while the rest of us drifted through conversation, beers, and snacks. Same table, same weather, same day, different channels of attention. At some point there was live music again. On that trip, music kept appearing around us often enough that it started to feel less like an event and more like part of the local weather. ## Sunday Call, Still I stepped away and called my parents while walking along the shoreline. I call my dad every Sunday, and keeping that call felt non-negotiable. There was a small part of me that wondered if it would be okay to skip just this once. I was in Brazil. I was in the middle of something rare. But that is exactly when routines are easiest to erode. Warm sand, salt air, sun on my shoulders, and ocean noise in the background made it one of the most scenic versions of a routine I had ever done, but to me it was still the same ritual. I told him I was having a lot of fun. I also felt the same frustration I had been feeling throughout the trip: there was no way to explain the full significance of Brazil in one conversation. I could share snapshots. I could not transfer the internal shift. Part of me worried that if I couldn’t explain it, maybe it wasn’t real yet. So I gave him details I could communicate cleanly. I told him about the weather and the beaches, and how parts of it reminded me of Hawaii, which felt like a useful bridge because my family has been going to Hawaii every other year for decades. What matters about the Sunday call is less what gets reported and more that the space exists. If I skip once because the excuse is good, it becomes easier to skip again. Then the habit starts to fray. Regular calls remove the pressure of deciding what is “important enough” to bring up. They create a recurring place where important things can surface without ceremony. After the call, I walked back toward the table feeling steadier than when I left, like I had reconnected two parts of my life that could have easily drifted apart. ## One More Swim From the bar, we could see ferries carrying people to islands within sight. Little moving lines between little fixed shapes. Options everywhere, and no pressure to chase all of them. Eventually Carol and Raphael headed out. Then it was Laio, Mariana, Livia, and me. Laio asked if we wanted to go into the water. The beach dropped off quickly. Three steps could take you from ankle-deep to chest-deep. We were body-surfing, catching alligators, and laughing through sets as they came in. At one point I noticed another beachgoer who looked like they were in trouble. They kept getting caught in a rough loop: lose footing, fall, stand up halfway, get hit again. I felt the quick spike of responsibility in my chest — the awareness that joy can turn sharp without warning. I got close to stepping over to help because it looked like one of those situations that can turn dangerous quickly. I realized how thin the line was between play and panic. Inside our own group, limits naturally split. Mariana and Livia got out when they were done. Laio and I stayed in longer, talking between waves. ## A Story That Took Time to Become True While we were still in the water, I asked Laio how he and Mariana met. He said they first crossed paths in school, where both of them studied chemical engineering, same as him and me. They noticed each other, but not in a dramatic way. No immediate certainty, no instant “this is the person.” They only started really getting to know each other later, around a celebration. He also told me Mariana did not go directly into a conventional engineering path. She finished the degree, then gave herself permission to experiment and eventually moved into modeling and acting. What stayed with me was how ordinary the beginning sounded compared with what their relationship became. A lot of people carry the idea that they will know right away if someone is truly right for them. I’ve carried that idea before. Their story did not fit that script. Their compatibility was not obvious at first glance. It was built over years, and probably through confusion and doubt that no one else saw. That felt important to me: first impressions can be real and still be incomplete. As the sun dropped lower, that conversation gave the day a clean emotional handoff into the evening. ## From Ubatuba to Paraty We went back to the Airbnb, packed, cleaned up a bit, and started driving north to Paraty. The drive carried the full physical residue of the day: humidity on skin, salty air through cracked windows, damp seats from ocean water, grains of sand still stuck to legs and ankles. I felt that strange post-beach fatigue — happy and slightly empty at the same time. At one point we passed metal canopy-like structures crossing above the road, and Livia explained they were for monkeys and other wildlife to cross. That detail felt like a small design clue about the region: this road was built for cars, but not only for cars. By the time we arrived, the light had shifted and the day felt fully transferred into its second act. # Paraty Paraty immediately felt distinct from the places I grew up around. Our Airbnb was a smaller house on a larger property, almost casita-style. We dropped our stuff and went straight into the historic center. Warm painted buildings, cobblestone streets, and old facades gave the city a different sense of time. On the West Coast, “old” often means decades. Here, parts of the city carried centuries. I felt small in a way I liked — like I was walking inside something that had already survived many lives. Restaurants spilled out into pedestrian streets with tables set directly into shared foot traffic. We wandered until something felt right and ate outside. There was another sensory layer I kept noticing: whistles from street vendors selling carved whistles that sounded uncannily like bird calls. The sound showed up again and again from different directions. After a while, it almost worked like a navigation cue. You could orient yourself in the downtown area by where those birdlike whistles were echoing from. It was slightly disorienting at first, like the city was imitating nature, but then it became comforting. ## The Mattress That Lied The next morning I woke up rested enough, but not especially comfortable. The mattress was comically hard. What made it funny was the deception. The bed looked like it should have been luxurious: a thick stack on top of a raised frame, visually oversized and dramatic. But when you actually landed on it, it felt like almost no give at all. Later the group tried it and had the same reaction: confusion, then disbelief, then laughter. I did not care much. I noticed a flicker of irritation when I first lay down, a small internal complaint that I could have easily amplified. But it passed quickly. If a soft mattress had been a hard requirement for me, it would have felt like a problem. Instead, it felt like proof of how little comfort actually mattered when the days were this full. ## A Bright Yellow Boat Laio had arranged a boat rental the night before. When we got to the dock, the boat was impossible to miss: bright yellow hull, bright yellow accents, and yellow starfish pillows that made the whole thing feel both practical and slightly cartoonish in a charming way. It fit the mood perfectly. The skipper took us to three beaches reachable only by water because the jungle behind them was too dense for normal land access. On the way out we passed clusters of small islands, some with rocks whitened by bird droppings, others with houses perched in ways that looked improbable from a distance. There were enough of them that the coastline felt dotted and almost unreal, like someone had exaggerated it slightly. ## Three Beaches and a Slow Afternoon The day was intentionally unstructured. Cooler with beers and snacks. Four or five hours on the water. Stop, swim, drift, talk, go quiet, move again. When I say slow, I mean it literally. I napped. Other people napped. We had long stretches where no one said anything. Not from social tension, just from being content enough to stop filling space with words. There were moments where I felt almost uncomfortable with how still it was, like my body was used to input. Then that discomfort dissolved. We did a little snorkeling, a little wandering, a little sitting with no objective other than being there. On one beach, there was a house built almost directly onto the sand. The skipper told us a story about an American who built it, left it in the care of a Brazilian, then later died and left it to that person. I never verified the story, but hearing it there made it feel plausible in a way that detached facts never do. The story itself was less important than the atmosphere around it. ## Photographing What You Would Otherwise Miss I shot photos on the boat and came away with images I liked. When I photographed Laio, I noticed his eyes in a way I had not fully registered before: light green, almost glowing in that reflected coastal light. That is one reason photography matters to me. It changes my speed and my attention. Through the camera, I am forced to make decisions in real time about framing, focus, and light, which is really a decision about what I think is worth preserving. I sometimes worry that if I do not consciously mark a moment, it will disappear into the blur of the rest of my life. The subject already exists, yes. But the exact configuration of moment, weather, expression, and perspective does not last. Taking the photo is my way of saying: this specific version mattered to me while it was happening. After the boat, we came back to shore, grabbed a quick lunch, rested at the Airbnb, and then went downtown again. ## Back Through Town Walking Paraty at night had its own rhythm. Live music from one direction. Restaurant chatter from another. Birdlike whistle sounds from street vendors threading between both. Light bouncing off old stones and wet patches in uneven streets. The cobblestones made walking physically attentive. I had to watch where I put my feet. That subtle demand changed my posture and pace, and it pulled me out of abstraction and back into my body. Even conversation feels different when every few steps ask for micro-adjustments. It kept me from drifting too far into my head. ## Lupita At dinner, street dogs moved between tables, and one of them decided our table was worth committing to. Her name was Lupita. Lupita was persistent and, honestly, delightfully chubby. Livia offered her something light first, maybe lettuce or a similar scrap, and Lupita refused with confidence. She had preferences and no shame about them. I had ordered steak, so I cut off a few pieces and offered those. Lupita accepted immediately. It was a small scene, but it stuck with me because it had personality. Not just “a dog begged.” Lupita had standards. There was something grounding about her simplicity. ## Forró Outside Open Store Later, on the way back, Mariana and Livia wanted a treat, so we stopped at a convenience store called Open Store. I laughed at the name. It sounded almost aggressively literal in English. And right outside, there was a band playing Forró while people danced on the street like it was the most normal thing in the world. What struck me was how ordinary the setting was. In my experience growing up, celebration often felt tied to explicit occasions: birthdays, weddings, graduations, events with a built-in reason. Here, in that moment, it felt more like the reason could simply be that music was available and people were present. I felt a small pang realizing how often I wait for permission to celebrate. No banner required. ## Mariana in Motion At one point near the end of the night, Mariana was dancing while eating her treat, smiling big, fully in her element. It reminded me of seeing Laio behind the bar in Ubatuba a couple days earlier. Different setting, same feeling. Some people look most like themselves when they are doing exactly the thing their body already wants to do. For Mariana, music and movement seem to dissolve effort. She did not look like she was trying to have a good time. She looked like someone already there. Watching that, I felt both admiration and a quiet question about myself: where do I look that natural? That image stayed with me on the drive back. ## What I Carried Forward These two days covered a lot of different scenes, but what stayed with me was less a single lesson and more a pattern. The moments that affected me most were not necessarily the biggest ones. They were the moments with texture and repetition: keeping a Sunday call while traveling, laughing in a cramped parking spot, hearing the same whistles across old streets, watching people dance outside a convenience store, noticing how attention changes when your footing is uneven. Ubatuba and Paraty did not feel interchangeable to me, but both kept showing me the same thing in different forms: meaning often arrived when I stayed close to what was happening instead of trying to elevate everything into an event. That is what I wanted from this trip in the first place. Continue to the next post: [[13. Beauty Without Capture]]