i long for more green
I find myself spending so. much. time. longing for a greener landscape around me. I don't have the privilege of living somewhere with vast open spaces of greenery (the park nearby is a drab looking thing bursting with unhoused folks and violence), but up until the age of 24 I lived somewhere far away from the city center.
It's so funny because at the time all I wanted was to leave that place behind and live somewhere closer to everything and everybody. My friends used to say I didn't "live" there, I "hid" there, because it was so far off. I was surrounded by dirt roads, trees, tall grass, a small lake, horses, buffalo, goats, birds. There was a tiny worm farm directly behind my place. I could look out my window and see nothing but sky and horizon.
Now I live in a tall building jammed between other tall buildings in the heart of the city, and I'm still lucky enough to see a sliver of sky between concrete walls when I look out the window. There's also the river going by, a slow waterway strangled by the streets and bridges, what is left of the mangrove heavy with litter on its muddy soil.
What I'm saying... how the turns have tabled.
I miss the silence, the birds, the freshness that comes with tree shades. I live in a tropical country and you have no idea how much tree shade makes a difference in this climate. I even miss my muddy street on the rainy season. At least it was just mud, not city gunk mixed with human waste and god knows what else.
I know the lake behind my place is gone now. They turned it into blocks and blocks of cheap apartment buildings. The worm farm is still there, somehow, but the horse riding space is gone, and I don't think the folks are still raising goats and buffalo around those parts. Now my old street is filled with sickly stray cats, and they cut down the huge cashew tree that stood in the middle of the road and served as a "square" (it was just a wooden bench tbh, but oh, how refreshing it was to stand under that shade).
That place is gone and here I am now. When I went home, on my old mp3 player, I always loved to play Wilson Simonal's "Moro no fim da rua" (1970), loosely translated as "I live at the end of the road". The chorus goes like this:
Moro lá no fim da rua / Onde tudo é escuro demais / Escuro demais
"I live there, at the end of the road, where everything is dark, far too dark".
I miss the dark nights, too.
Updates
General updates
- Reading: Rushing through Las ciudads invisibles
- Watching: Severance s2, RuPaul's Drag Race s17
- Playing: Leaf Blower Revolution
Life updates
- Did a mini overhaul of the blog, created more pages, renamed stuff to look like a book bc I'm a book nerd. Also I've just upgraded bearblog so I might tweak around even more.
- There's so much more stuff I want to include on my website, like a page for my cats and list of my published stories.
- Bought a bike. It's used, but it'll do. I'm still afraid of cars and suchlike, but I've used it a few times now and even after a few drinks I managed to get home unscathed. That's the advantage of now living so close to bars and everything else. lol