Three years ago I was arriving to Côte d´Azur. I cannot say it was yesterday. Because I felt the time passing by…
Being emigrant or expatriate or whatever you want to call it… is the feeling of not belonging anywhere. Even if unconsciously we appropriate of the places, the sensations, the flavours… exist in us – or perhaps just in myself -, the feeling of unattachment. I have been thinking a lot about this. About where I truly feel at home. It´s true that Lisbon is the city that resides my heart. For all the reasons. But it´s also true that as time goes I feel more and more foreigner in my own country. In France I miss speaking in portuguese, but when I´m in Portugal I feel better with foreigners than with portugueses. I find myself looking for the words to express my feelings. And sometimes the thing I want to say only makes sense if I say it in french. Not enough. Other times I feel the same but in english. Now, “pasteis de nata” are not as better as before – I consider them too sweet. The excess of food on the table makes me loose hungry. The excess of familiarity makes me uncomfortable, as the discussions of smallness…
Presently I´m this. No one supports it! Sometimes… not even me!
In France I became more confident at all levels. I don´t know if it has been France or the experience of having changed the stable and confortable life I had in Lisbon, for this one much more uncertain. France is a country that sometimes I love… and sometimes I hate. It´s a country where sometimes I don´t feel wellcome… and other times it holds me and tells me I´m needed. It´s a country that allows me to dream because it makes me feel safe, not letting me down. It´s a country that taught me to talk with my lips almost closed, telling words which sound like small kisses. It´s an hexagon-shaped country as the honeycombs. Sometimes I have the will of staying. Sometimes I just want to leave. And every time I feel like leaving, I look at this sea in front and I already miss it… even before I left.
A person obtain all the university degrees and then is not able to solve the simple equations of life!
And this has been my life. A pause that turned into a (nearly) perpetual comma. Where I’m not there … but I’m not here, also. Three years can be so long. Three years is, in fact, long.
agora digo eu 