The first time they set eyes on each other had been some two months before, during her first days at the company, when she had raised her head from her work only to see a dashing young man come in and suddenly she was bewitched by the warmest golden brown eyes she had ever seen; she, who had always been partial to blue eyes, not brown, simply stared at him for some seconds, and he stared back. During that second …
Tag: love
Thank you. Even at this point – when I don’t know if what we have is ending – thank you for having been in my life, thank you for so many things. Thank you for making me believe in love after the long desert of the last years of my marriage. Thank you for making me feel like a teenager in love again in my mature years. Thank you for making me feel loved, appreciated, beautiful, attractive, passionate, loving, young, …
I’m putting the dishes in the dishwasher and I hear some piano notes. My son Afonso is playing. I smile and I think of a time, long ago, when he was five and asked to take piano lessons at nursery school. We bought him that small piano as he had to practice every day at home. Which he did. His teacher had said he was very good at it and he played a song at the school’s Christmas party …
I remember it so well – we didn’t really spend “Christmas” together as we didn’t celebrate Christmas Eve or Christmas Day together, but the moments we spent together at Christmas time were very special, because our love was so new and we were ecstatically happy. One of those moments was precisely on the 23rd of December of some years ago. We had been going out for only a few weeks and our relationship was still a secret; and we wanted …
It was a winter afternoon, cold and damp, with heavy clouds announcing rain. She felt restless, but she very much wanted to see “Out of Africa”, recently arrived on Lisbon cinemas, so she agreed when he suggested they go and see it. As usual, when the lights went out he searched for her hand. She let herself hold his but she felt ice cold. And then, as the beautiful, intense, romantic and ultimately sad story unfolded before her eyes, she …
He remembers the first time he saw her, the friend of a friend…tall, slim, with dark blond curls falling down her shoulders, deep set eyes the colour of the sea when it is more green than blue… He loved her then as he loved her during the next three years and a half when they were going out together. And it feels as if he has never stopped loving her in fact. Their time together was intense yet serene, adventurous …
Today I was reading in a magazine how two recent mothers have created a blog where they talk about the “realistic” side of motherhood, leaving behind the “romantic” descriptions that usually describe it as a “blissful state”. Nothing further from the truth, they say. And they go on to describe the horrible nausea they felt in the early stages of pregnancy and their vomiting everywhere and in the less convenient places; their feeling like a bloated whale in the last …
Sometimes I wonder if you still think of me, after all these years. I must say – for years I didn’t think much about you. Marriage, motherhood, career, so many things happening at the same time. They all filled my thoughts and it seemed I was always too busy with the present and planning for the future. I don’t know why, but getting older makes you look at the past more often. Maybe it is because life becomes increasingly unsatisfactory …
She is going up the subway stairs with her mother. They have been downtown for some Christmas shopping and they are carrying many bags. Outside, the evening is cold, but the smell of roasting nuts – so typical of Lisbon at this time of the year – feels like a warm welcome. In the distance she hears the sounds of the latest Christmas hit “Last Christmas” by Wham. She sings along and her mother cheerfully joins in. They walk home …
He was born in 1914, the year of the beginning of the Great World War. His parents had both come to Mozambique from Madeira island – first his father and some years later his mother, who had joined her brother. They met and soon they were married. He was the elder son, being followed by three sisters. His father was a successful businessman. When he was six the whole family took a ship to go on a long holiday to …