There’s nothing compared to the exhilaration you feel in the beginning of a love story. Whatever the season, it always feels like Spring – the sky is blue, the sun is shining and warm, and there is a bright light in your life; it’s called being in love. Falling in love Falling in love usually happens suddenly, as if you were hit by something. One day you look at a person you have known for a time, and you …
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If only I could bear the weight of your pain upon my shoulders, If only it could be me wearing those crutches whose metallic sound on the floor has become so hard to bear. If only I could rip the heartache out of your chest and bring it into mine, Knowing your heart would henceforth be beating peacefully and joyfully. If only I could wipe away the infinite sorrow from your beautiful blue eyes, Whose bewildered look breaks my own …
Many times you live next door to someone for years and you know nothing about them; when you meet in the lift you say good morning or good evening; most rarely you exchange a few trivialities about the weather, as the lift goes up or down; and little else. Everyone goes on with their lives and that’s how it should be. However, from time to time, something happens that makes you discover your neighbours’ dark secrets. The other day as …
My friend Nora shares with me a song from a Mexican band, Maná, who have suddenly become quite famous in Spain. The song is called Bendita tu luz (something like “your blessed light”). I listen and immediately take to it. The music is joyful, and the lyrics romantic – the singer says about his new love, a girl with such a special light in her eyes that he calls it “blessed”; and about the blessed moment when they first met, …
Maybe it was the box. Maybe it was that lunch, or perhaps both. Something clicked inside me, and it’s definitely not making me feel better. A gift and lunch Arriving at my office after the holidays I saw the colourful Christmas package of my favourite Portuguese porcelain shop and wondered who had left it there. After all, it was Christmas, a time for gifts. I looked for a card but found none. There was only my name …
She turns it again and again inside her head and for the thousandth time she is unable to reach a conclusion. Rather, she feels unable to decide. Her life hangs in the balance and she has no clue about what she will do next. She knows what she wants to do, what she would like to do, but then she thinks of the unsurmountable obstacles and she falters. She cannot do it. But how can she not do it, and …
Six am and the alarm clock rings. It’s been some time since I’m awake. Today my son Afonso is being operated on and we have to be at the hospital for check in at 7.30. I get up and do my ten-minute morning meditation. Need it more than ever. When it is over, I am calmer, I have a feeling all will go well. I get dressed and when I’m having breakfast, I hear someone coming out of his …
I have written many times about love, but I really believe passion is what makes the world go round. Be it passion in the positive way, that is often related to love, or the opposite, passion fuelled by anger, turning into hatred. As the year ends, I think of stories of passion unravelling before my eyes. With passion, sooner or later, there comes a companion, and that is pain, heartbreak. For when passion hits is it is so strong …
It had been a stormy day, with havoc all over – flight and train cancellations, rain, wind…as in the previous days. I thought the rugby match of last Friday night would be cancelled – if not for other reasons, because the green grass field would have turned into mud; but no, it was on, and my son Afonso left for the club with his usual long, confident, strides, the exhilaration of the forthcoming game all around him like a magnetic …
Tomorrow it will be precisely twenty-one years that I received the most precious Christmas gift of all: my son Pedro, “the most beautiful baby she had ever seen” in the words of his proud Grandma, who naturally had already forgotten saying the very same words almost four years before, when my son Afonso was born, on a sunny February day that felt like an early Spring. Christmas baby Little Pedro was born on a grey December day, but he …
