![[Brazil_Reflections_Part_6.mp3]] ## Arriving at the House When I hear the word _house_, I picture California. That’s where I grew up, and for most of my life that word has carried a very specific meaning. A house is a place where you’re an individual. It’s yours. It’s bounded. It’s controlled. It’s where you go to push the rest of the world out and decide, at least temporarily, not to deal with it. Even now, after years of apartment living, I notice how much I still cling to that idea. I still want home to be the place where the noise stops. Where the outside world is held back by walls. And I still feel a familiar frustration when that boundary fails—when neighbors are loud, when life leaks in, when it becomes impossible to pretend that I’m not living directly alongside other people. That illusion was challenged almost immediately when I arrived at Laio’s house in São Paulo. It was clearly his house. Its own structure. Its own walls. But those walls were pressed directly up against the walls of neighboring houses. Not shared walls in the apartment sense—separate buildings, built so close together that there was no space between them at all. The house didn’t occupy _most_ of the property. It occupied _all_ of it. I realized quickly that I had been carrying a very narrow definition of what a house is supposed to be. In the version I grew up with, even when houses take up a large portion of their lot, there’s almost always space around them. Distance is built in. Even apartment buildings are typically separated from one another. Wall-to-wall housing was something I associated vaguely with places like New York City, not something I had ever experienced firsthand. Here, that closeness wasn’t an exception. It was the default. ## Living Wall-to-Wall Living wall-to-wall changes things. In a setup like this, it’s difficult—maybe impossible—to maintain the idea that your private life is fully separate from the public one. You hear people walking down the street. You hear dogs barking across the neighborhood. You hear neighbors talking, cooking, laughing, hosting barbecues. Sound travels. Presence travels. Life spills over. It becomes hard to pretend that you’re not sharing this place with other people. And that blurring of boundaries didn’t just feel architectural. It felt social. It felt psychological. I’ve noticed that, at least in the American context I grew up in, we treat the house as deeply private. Inviting someone into it can feel like asking a lot. We clean. We organize. We prepare. We present a version of our lives that feels acceptable to be seen. Here, that distinction felt softer. Laio and Mariana weren’t staging their home or their lives for me. They weren’t curating an image. They weren’t trying to maintain separate public and private selves. That doesn’t mean there was no privacy—of course there was—but when something was obvious, it wasn’t hidden. When something was present, it wasn’t denied. The environment itself made denial difficult. ## Being Welcomed In Shortly after I arrived, Mariana greeted me. She’s Laio’s fiancée, and they’ve been together for many years—nearly a decade—and have lived together for a long time. I knew before the trip that this experience wouldn’t just be about spending time with Laio. I was stepping into a life the two of them had built together. Mariana didn’t seem overwhelmed at first. She was warm, excited, welcoming. Nothing felt off in the moment. But after that initial greeting, and only once the moment had passed, she quietly excused herself and went to lie down. At the time, it wasn’t obvious to me what was happening. Later, she explained it. She has been learning English for years—seriously, intentionally—and has maintained a Duolingo streak of over a thousand days. She cares deeply about communicating well. About showing up. About offering a good experience. And that care created pressure. Not fear. Not discomfort with me. Care. Her body reacted before she could name what was happening. And once she did name it, it made complete sense. That moment stayed with me. ## Entering Someone Else’s Life Later, Laio showed me around the house. At some point, we walked into the bedroom. It took a moment for me to realize it was his. When it clicked that there was only one bed, I asked where they were going to sleep. He said they’d take the couch. I immediately refused. He was trying to make my experience as comfortable as possible. But what he didn’t fully see—and what I did—was that I was entering a life that wasn’t built for me. Their home, their routines, their shared space were designed for the two of them. And that was exactly as it should be. Some discomfort was unavoidable. I could minimize it where possible. I could take the couch. I could accept that I was a guest. And I could choose not to fixate on the awkwardness of that fact. That choice—to accept discomfort in exchange for meaning—showed up again and again throughout this trip. ## Walking Through a Mixed World That evening, we went out to eat. After dinner, we walked through the neighborhood to get drinks. Bars, grocery stores, gyms, dog washers, tattoo parlors—everything was mixed together. Some areas leaned more residential, others more commercial, but visually they weren’t that different. Many buildings looked like houses until you realized they were businesses. There were no massive parking lots. No sharp transitions between “living” and “doing.” Everything was close. Walkable. Layered. And it struck me how similar this layout is to the way people actually are. In the U.S., we separate zones: residential here, commercial there. We separate identities too. You’re your college major. Your job title. Your role. We like clean boundaries because they reduce friction. But that separation has costs. Distance becomes traffic. Friction becomes isolation. And simplicity becomes a kind of quiet dishonesty. ## What the Closeness Revealed In São Paulo—both in the housing and in the people—it felt harder to pretend things that weren’t true were true. Harder to pretend we don’t live among each other. Harder to pretend we’re only one thing. Hearing each other—literally—felt grounding. And seeing Mariana live as many things at once gave me permission to do the same. To be an engineer and a writer. A property manager and a musician. Someone who creates art, sings, drums, takes photographs—not as side hobbies, but as real expressions of self. For a long time, I had turned those parts of myself down. Focus, I believed, was the key. Simplicity made everything easier. It made life legible. It made progress measurable. But it didn’t make it meaningful. What this place reminded me—quietly, insistently—is that meaning doesn’t come from separation. It comes from contact. From overlap. From allowing things to be close enough to be felt, even when that closeness is uncomfortable. Living without the buffer didn’t feel like a loss of privacy so much as a loss of illusion. The illusion that a house can hold the world back. That our lives can be neatly divided into public and private, work and home, one identity at a time. In that neighborhood, in that house, in those relationships, it became harder to pretend things that weren’t true were true. Harder to ignore each other. Harder to simplify ourselves. The walls were close, the boundaries were thin, and life was louder—but it was also more honest. And in that honesty, I felt something I hadn’t realized I’d been missing: not comfort, exactly, but contact. Not separation, but presence. Not a place to hide from the world, but a place where being part of it was unavoidable—and meaningful.