![[Brazil_Reflections_Part_14.mp3]]## Southbound When we finally left Serranos, the trip stopped feeling open-ended. Until then, even with all the moving around, Brazil had still felt expansive to me. There was always another drive, another relative, another beach, another meal, another unexpected turn in the day. The trip had unfolded like that from the beginning—one moment flowing into the next without any strong sense that we were approaching a conclusion. Leaving Serranos changed that. The direction of travel mattered now. We were no longer simply moving through Brazil; we were moving back toward something, retracing the path toward São Paulo and eventually toward the end of the trip itself. The drive from Minas Gerais toward São Paulo made that change obvious almost immediately. For a long stretch, the opposite side of the highway had collapsed into a complete standstill. Trucks were stopped in long, unbroken lines stretching far down the road, and some of the drivers had gotten out of their vehicles entirely and were simply standing beside them, waiting for something to change. From our side of the road, moving southbound, the scene looked surreal—an enormous artery of traffic that had simply ceased to function. We were fortunate. The stoppage was on the northbound side, not ours, so we kept moving while the other direction remained frozen. That asymmetry stayed with me as we drove. Traffic is one of those things I tend to take for granted when life is going my way. My default expectation, if I’m honest, is that there should be no traffic at all—that I should be able to move freely, that the road should remain open, that the world should cooperate with my schedule. When that expectation breaks, my first instinct is embarrassingly selfish. I look at all the other cars and think: look at all these people in my way. But the highway back to São Paulo gave me a clearer view of that thought. Roads are not built for me. They are shared surfaces, shared constraints, shared timing. If I’m delayed, it does not automatically mean I’m the victim of everyone else’s poor planning. Some of those people may be in a genuine hurry. Someone might be trying to get to a hospital, or rushing to help a friend, or late to work in a way that actually matters. Most of the time, I am not in that kind of urgent situation. If anything, it is probably more likely that I am the one in someone else’s way than the reverse. That felt like the right correction to carry into São Paulo, because São Paulo would spend the next two days teaching me the same lesson again in other forms. We made it back to Laio’s house that night and slept there. By that point the trip had settled into a rhythm I trusted: wake up, eat breakfast, and then let the day reveal itself. Brazil had repeatedly shown me that planning less often led to better days. But the next morning carried a different emotional tone from the beginning. The plan itself was simple enough. We would eat breakfast, return the rental car, and then take Livia to the bus station so she could head home. Yet Livia was visibly upset that morning, and at first I didn’t understand why. Later Laio explained that her mother had called with bad news about one of their dogs. The dog was apparently in very poor condition, unable to stand to go outside and lying in its own waste. Even hearing the description secondhand was distressing. It made sense that she wanted to get home quickly. The whole morning carried that quiet emotional weight: the practical motions of departure wrapped around something painful and urgent happening somewhere else. All four of us drove together to return the rental car, and from there we shifted into the choreography of city logistics. We called an Uber to the subway station and then took the train toward the bus terminal. The subway was crowded in the way São Paulo often is crowded—not chaotic or dramatic, just densely inhabited. The train felt packed with ordinary weekday purpose. Everyone seemed to know where they were going, even when I didn’t. Somewhere in the middle of that ride, the atmosphere changed. ## The Rapper on the Train At one point during the ride, a man began freestyle rapping in Portuguese. I couldn’t understand the words, but I could hear the structure of what he was doing. His cadence was steady, his tone musical, and the rhythm of the language carried enough energy that it was enjoyable even without comprehension. He didn’t seem hesitant or nervous; he sounded like someone who had done this many times before. The flow was relaxed and confident enough that it was pleasant simply to listen to him. Later I was told that he had been rapping partly about the people around him, and that at one point he had described me as “scary” because of my big arms. That made me laugh, but it also made me think about how I had handled the interaction. I hadn’t looked at him. I had deliberately kept my eyes away, even though I liked what he was doing. Part of that was habit. My default reaction to anyone with a hat out or a hand extended is usually avoidance. It isn’t cruelty exactly, but it is a kind of defensive non-engagement—a quiet attempt to move through the situation without having to participate in it. Another part of it was fear that if I made eye contact he might become more insistent, which would force me to actively reject him. Avoiding eye contact felt like a way of avoiding that entire social moment. In hindsight, that felt harsher than it needed to be. He wasn’t exactly begging. He was performing. He was offering something and hoping to be rewarded for it. Livia understood that immediately. She smiled at him, acknowledged him, and gave him money. He commented on her tattoos and guessed that she was vegetarian. He was right. The whole exchange felt natural and human. She responded like someone interacting with another person, while I responded like someone trying to minimize social risk. What bothered me later wasn’t that I didn’t pay him. It was that I withheld even the smallest signal that I saw him. I could have smiled. I could have nodded. I could have acknowledged that I did, in fact, enjoy what he was doing. Instead I let the possibility of awkwardness override that impulse. That thought stayed with me when we arrived at the bus station. ## Goodbye to Livia We stayed with Livia until she had her ticket and knew exactly which bus to take. By that point we had spent about a week together—moving through beaches, long drives, family land, translation lag, Mario Party, and the strange intimacy that develops when people remain in the same orbit long enough. I had genuinely enjoyed her company, and I was glad she had been part of the trip. When it was time to say goodbye, I made sure to hug her and kiss her on the cheek the way good friends in Brazil often do. That gesture mattered to me more than it might sound like it should. Part of me was still thinking about the rapper on the subway and about how easily awkwardness can cause me to retract from social contact. I didn’t want to do that here. I didn’t want fear of getting the moment slightly wrong to flatten something that was real. Even with my limited Portuguese, I wanted her to feel clearly that I had enjoyed our time together and was sad to see her go. That was true, and sometimes truth deserves a little effort even when language makes the effort clumsy. In fact, one of the clearest things I noticed in Brazil was how many people simply refused to let language become a barrier to basic warmth. Many of the Brazilians I met did not speak English, and I spoke very little Portuguese, yet that rarely seemed to stop people from trying to communicate anyway. They would say what they wanted to say. Tone would carry part of the meaning, body language another part, and context would fill in the rest. Understanding was rarely perfect, but it was usually good enough. Seeing that shifted something for me. I think I had previously overestimated how much mutual language is required before real social contact becomes possible. Brazil kept showing me a different model: say the thing, gesture the thing, smile the thing, try. Misunderstanding may not be ideal, but it is often far better than silence. If someone matters to you—or is simply standing in front of you—it is usually better to attempt contact imperfectly than to withhold it completely. After Livia boarded her bus and disappeared into the larger system of travel, the city became ours again for a few hours. ## Lunch and a Small Humiliation We walked around for a while and eventually stopped for lunch. Somewhere during the meal Mariana commented that I wasn’t eating very much. I told them the truth: I had been struggling with constipation. The cause seemed obvious enough. For several days I had been eating a lot of meat and rice and not much fiber. Nothing dramatic had happened; the body was simply objecting to a pattern. From that moment forward, both Mariana and Laio shifted into care mode in a way that I found unexpectedly touching. There is something strangely vulnerable about being physically uncomfortable in someone else’s home, especially when the discomfort is unglamorous and mildly embarrassing. Yet they didn’t make it awkward. They simply treated it as a problem that needed a practical solution. Mariana recommended foods, and papaya—which had appeared throughout the trip as a normal breakfast fruit—suddenly became less of a fruit and more of a treatment plan. She made teas. They checked in on me gently but directly. The whole situation reminded me of the way my mother used to take care of me when I was sick: attentive, practical, and entirely unceremonious. It was uncomfortable, yes, but it was also oddly comforting. Being cared for in such an ordinary way made the situation feel less isolating. ## Rush Hour Later that afternoon we headed back by subway, and this was when São Paulo gave me one of the clearest demonstrations of how a place can feel chaotic and organized at the same time. It was weekday rush hour. One transfer in particular felt almost like a stampede at first glance. As soon as we stepped off one train, a wave of people began moving quickly up the stairs toward the next platform. Bodies in motion, all pointed somewhere, all treating delay as expensive. I remember standing on the escalator while Laio explained one of the unwritten rules that makes the whole system work: if you’re standing still, you stand on the right so people climbing the escalator can pass on the left. The subway kept revealing small systems like that. When we reached the platform, people lined up beside each door opening in two queues, one on each side. Those at the front, Laio explained, often only boarded if there were seats available. If the seats were already taken, some of them would step aside rather than cram in standing. And if you were willing to stand, that was your moment to move forward and take their place. It sounded strangely procedural when he described it, but when the train arrived I watched the entire process unfold exactly as he had predicted. Seats filled, people stepped aside, others moved forward. The whole exchange happened quickly and without discussion. From the outside it might have looked like disorder. From the inside it felt like choreography. In a city that crowded, the system only works because thousands of people are participating in small acts of cooperation—standing to one side, letting others pass, waiting for a moment, moving when it’s their turn. Again I found myself thinking about the highway earlier that day. Other people are not automatically obstacles. Sometimes a crowded system functions precisely because everyone is quietly coordinating with everyone else. When we finally got off at the station closest to Laio’s house, it was raining hard enough that the next decision was obvious. Instead of walking, we called an Uber and rode back. By the time we arrived home, we had all the familiar vague plans people make at the end of a day: maybe watch a movie, maybe cook something, maybe go out again. It’s funny how often life quietly shrinks those plans down into something much simpler. We walked to the grocery store, bought food, came back, and Laio made pasta. By the time we ate, cleaned up, and sat down, the evening was essentially over. There was something perfect about that. Sometimes you imagine an evening as a large container full of possibility, only to discover that it ends up being exactly one errand, one meal, a few conversations, and sleep—not because anything went wrong, but because time is shorter than it appears. ## Papaya as Medicine The next morning Mariana asked almost immediately whether the constipation had passed. It hadn’t. There was nothing dramatic to do about it, just the usual unexciting advice: drink water, eat fruit, be patient, and avoid forcing the issue. Bodies tend to correct themselves eventually if the conditions improve. So we carried on with the day. At some point the three of us started playing Mario Party. I don’t remember much about the actual game—who won, which minigames appeared, any of the normal details that would usually make a board game memorable. What I remember instead is the mood. It was relaxed and a little silly, the kind of afternoon where no one is trying particularly hard and that lack of effort somehow makes the whole thing more enjoyable. The stakes were nonexistent, the conversation wandered, and the game itself functioned mostly as a loose framework for spending time together. Eventually I excused myself to use the bathroom. This time the constipation was finally over. When I returned to the room, I told Laio I had good news and bad news. The good news was that the problem had been solved. The bad news was that I had clogged his toilet. That remains one of the least dignified ways to announce physical recovery, but it was accurate. We laughed about it, finished the game, and moved on. The embarrassment had already happened, the discomfort was gone, and no one seemed interested in making the situation heavier than it needed to be. It became just another small human event folded into the day—an awkward moment acknowledged and then absorbed back into normal life. Later Mariana wanted to sing, and that shifted the entire atmosphere again. Laio picked up his guitar and started playing while Mariana and I sang along. None of it was polished and there was no real structure to what we were doing. We weren’t rehearsing anything, and we certainly weren’t preparing for a performance. It was messy in the way casual music often is when people are simply enjoying the act of making sound together. We forgot lyrics, restarted songs halfway through, and sometimes dissolved into laughter when things fell apart. What struck me was how comfortable both of them seemed in that unfinished state. They weren’t worried about sounding perfect, or even particularly good. The music existed simply because they were willing to participate in it. Watching that made something about my own relationship with singing clearer. I enjoy singing, but I often hesitate to do it because I’m dissatisfied with how I sound before I’ve practiced enough. There’s a perfectionistic instinct that creeps in: if I wouldn’t want to share the result, maybe I shouldn’t do the thing at all. But that reasoning creates the exact conditions that prevent improvement. If I only allow myself to sing once I’m already satisfied with how it sounds, then I avoid the very practice that would allow me to get there. That afternoon made that pattern visible in a gentle way. The discomfort of sounding imperfect isn’t the obstacle—it’s the path through which improvement happens. What I needed was not less discomfort. What I needed was a willingness to move through it. ## Before the Drums Started That night Mariana got dressed to go out. I asked where we were going, and Laio shrugged and said he didn’t really know. Mariana was in charge of the plan. By that point in the trip, that sort of answer had become familiar. Many of the best moments of the trip had emerged that way, through loosely formed plans that revealed their shape only after we arrived somewhere. The place we ended up at was difficult to classify neatly. It felt like a large concrete slab with an awning covering part of it, and a small trailer or booth where beer was being served. Nearby I noticed brewing equipment, which made the whole place feel part brewery, part improvised event space, part neighborhood gathering spot. Nothing about it felt curated or designed for aesthetic effect. It was rough-edged and utilitarian in appearance, yet full of energy in a way that made the setting itself feel secondary to the people inhabiting it. Before the larger music began, the night had a quieter emotional center. At one point Laio and Mariana were dancing together to “Um Sonho” by Nação Zumbi. I took a video of them in that moment. It was the second time I had filmed the two of them dancing during the trip. The first time had been on Mariana’s phone for their own memories. This time I recorded it for myself. By then the moment meant more to me than simply watching friends dance. Earlier in the trip I had seen one of the more difficult tensions between them. Laio had received an offer to go to Texas for work, and the timing had been brutal. He would be leaving the day after I left Brazil. The three of us had spent two weeks moving through the same shared rhythm, and suddenly that rhythm was about to break in two directions at once—first with my departure, then with his. For Mariana the situation carried additional emotional weight. She felt that this Carnival might be her last before becoming a mother, perhaps the final moment in her life when she would experience it with a certain kind of freedom. Laio’s opportunity meant he would miss that entirely. The offer had arrived quickly, only about a week earlier, leaving very little time for either of them to process what the change meant. What stayed with me about that situation was not the fact that they had conflict. Of course they did. Real relationships inevitably contain moments when timing, ambition, and desire fail to align neatly. What mattered to me was how honestly they faced that misalignment. They were not pretending that everything was effortless. They were two people whose lives occasionally pulled in different directions, yet who continued to care for one another within that tension. So when I filmed them dancing that night—holding each other, leaning in to speak into one another’s ears—I wasn’t watching a fantasy of perfect compatibility. I was watching something more convincing than that. I was watching two people continue to choose closeness despite the fact that closeness does not eliminate difficulty. Then the energy of the entire place changed. Extravagantly dressed people began arriving in larger numbers, and eventually we learned that a samba band was scheduled to rehearse there as part of Carnival preparation. Once the musicians started playing, the atmosphere shifted from relaxed conversation to something much more physical. Drums filled the space, producing a dense rhythmic pressure that seemed to travel through the body before it registered as sound. It became nearly impossible to stand still. The group resembled a marching band in its intensity: percussion everywhere, rhythm layered on rhythm until the entire crowd moved together. Whether someone considered themselves a dancer stopped mattering. The music itself created motion. We drank beers and joined the dancing. The band played for hours, and the crowd thinned only gradually as the night stretched on. From my perspective the whole evening felt beautifully unplanned. We had simply gone wherever Mariana suggested, and the night had turned into a live Carnival rehearsal. That kind of spontaneity had become one of the recurring gifts of Brazil. Celebration often seemed to appear without requiring elaborate preparation or justification. Sometimes the music existed. And that was reason enough. ## The Last Day The next morning was my final full stretch of the trip. We went to Laio’s aunt’s house for a barbecue, and there I met more of his family: his grandmother, his mother and father, his brother, his sister-in-law, and his nephew. The afternoon unfolded with the relaxed rhythm that family gatherings often develop once everyone has accepted the shape of the day. People moved in and out of conversations, food appeared continuously from the grill, and the social space expanded and contracted as relatives drifted between rooms and the backyard. By that point I had spent enough time around Brazilian family gatherings to begin recognizing their internal logic. Barbecues were not staged as special occasions requiring formal attention. They functioned more like social infrastructure—a reliable environment where people could gather, eat, and exist together without needing a specific reason for doing so. Eventually the time came to leave. We returned to the house, grabbed my suitcase, and drove to the airport. I assumed they would drop me off outside the terminal and that I would handle the rest from there. That would have made practical sense. Departures often operate that way. Instead, when we arrived, Laio parked the car and both he and Mariana came inside with me. That gesture affected me more than I expected. At the beginning of the trip, Laio had parked and come into the airport to meet me when I arrived in Brazil. I had already written about how meaningful that moment felt. There is something powerful about someone interrupting their own momentum to physically receive another person rather than simply coordinating their arrival. Now, at the end of the trip, the same gesture appeared again in reverse. I wasn’t merely being delivered to the terminal. I was being accompanied all the way to the point where I could no longer be accompanied. The symmetry of that moment made the goodbye feel complete. I hugged both of them and told them how much the trip had meant to me. Then I stepped into the security line and began moving forward with the other passengers. As the line advanced, I kept turning back to look at them. They were still there. They didn’t rush the ending. They didn’t treat the goodbye as something to abbreviate once the logistics were finished. After I finally passed through security, I looked back one more time and gave a large wave before turning toward my gate. That image stayed with me more vividly than almost anything else from the trip. Not a beach. Not a waterfall. Not a meal. Not even the music. Two people standing in place a little longer than necessary so that the ending would feel complete. ## What Stayed With Me A great deal happened during those final days, but what ties the memories together for me now is not any single scene. It is the pattern that emerged across them. Again and again, I found myself being corrected out of small self-centered assumptions I didn’t realize I carried. On the highway, I was reminded that other people are not simply obstacles between me and where I want to go. On the subway, I watched a dense urban system reveal itself as a choreography of cooperation rather than chaos. With Livia, I saw that imperfect communication is still far better than withholding warmth. With the rapper, I recognized how easily fear of awkwardness can turn into unnecessary distance. With my constipation—ridiculous as that example may sound—I experienced what it feels like to be cared for in an ordinary bodily way by people who had no obligation to make me comfortable. With the music, I was reminded that something does not need to be polished to be worth doing. And with Laio and Mariana, I witnessed a version of love that felt convincing precisely because it was not frictionless. The trip had begun with me being welcomed into a life that was already in motion. It ended with me being walked back out of that life gradually and with affection, rather than hurriedly or impersonally. That mattered. Because in the end, what Brazil kept showing me was not just beauty or spontaneity or celebration. It kept showing me how much of life depends on our willingness to share space with one another—to share the road, the train car, the room, the awkward moment, the unfinished song, the difficult conversation, and eventually the goodbye. And how often the most meaningful thing we can do is not avoid that sharedness, but enter it fully. Continue to the next post: [[15. What I'm Bringing Home]]