Rita

My problem:

I try to rush my growth. I have always wanted to be older than I am. Ready to just get and go. It has led to me trying things before I was ready and also to discovering things early and having more time to enjoy them. 

Yet, I pessimize about the future. I do not like what it looks like. I am nostalgic. Always looking back to more glorious times. 

I feel like Moraes Zogoiby--a misplaced hybrid growing too fast but not fast enough. Searching for another time. 

I long to be a cowboy. The post-Civil War American West. Oh my god. My heart is there baby. 

But when I ride these streets and tomar this sol, I feel Brazilian and it feels exhilarating. 

I am very easily impressionable. I see True Grit and want to be Jeff Bridges. I see a palm tree and melt. It causes: me to be very adaptable and to have no true sense of identity, which I suppose manifests itself as me being a comfortable liar. Or to use a less harsh term, "one whose actions are inconsistent with his words." Mesma coisa, ne?

Well folks, I am learning about the 2+ sides of myself on this journey. The American Vaqueiro, the Brazilian Cowboy. The undefined hybrid searching for an identity, wanting it all and only one. 

Well, what else to do folks, but sit on my balcony with Merle Haggard blending with loud soccer on TV in my ears, palm trees and outlaws in my sights, Virginian tobacco and goiaba juice stirred by my tongue, nostalgia for a rib-eye entering one nostril and the salty spray of the sea exiting the other...

...and all this, all this folks, leaves just me, this strange mixture of New England autumn leaves and feijoada, to be touched by what I perceive to surround me.