Being back is both easy and hard.
Easy because it’s a return to the routine, the familiar, the established. The normal. Returning is too easy.
Hard because Bahia seems like a sonho passageiro. A passing dream… a fantasy… unreal. And yet I know it is real, and I think about all the treinos and rodas and wonderful things I’m missing.
My next trip seems so far away; the months stretch out ahead of me and yet I don’t want to look at it that way, as though my life here was a prison sentence that I have to endure. Far from it! I love New York, I love my family and my CPM family, I love FICA-NY and Djoniba dance classes and Central Park in the summer.
I feel like the man who had two lives, one dreaming, one waking, and could not tell which was reality. I have family in both… a job in both… a language particular to each… at times I feel like I’m a different person depending on which one I’m in.
Preciso esquecer… I need to forget… to avoid thinking about Brazil lest it poison my enjoyment of the present. But it’s hard, very hard. And there is capoeira, the unescapable element that links my two worlds to each other.
Jogo aqui em Nova Iorque
Jogo lá em Salvador…
