Eight years ago, I found enduring love. It was a desire I wanted to breathe, soak in and sleep with every day. Exotic, intoxicating, passionate and seductive, it struck me like a thunderbolt. At the same time, it felt like coming home. Geography kept us apart, but I never forgot my beloved. With the passage of time, the ardour dissipated from infatuation to constancy and then the occasional yearning; the fight felled - but still I would always return to 'what if...?' Eventually, the object of my desire became my 'safe place' - whenever life became tough, I would dream of my darling, imagining us together.
For all those bar the two and a half people who actually read my blog, I have detailed the events leading to me leaving London with my baby son at length on www.babydoesbrazil.com - but let's just say things hadn't been looking too good for me in my hometown when, out of the blue, I was invited to revisit a shamanic retreat I'd written about to some notoriety many moons ago. We were chaperoned by my brother. He left us in Bahia. There, I became reacquainted with my darling and fell in love all over again.
When you're meant to be together, things go right. No, actually, they go fantastic, and that's how life has been since we were reunited. You could say that things just fell into place and worked out for us. My son has been happy, my love and I each became more powerful and felt the world to be an open and supportive place to us. It's been a period of great personal happiness and fortune. Until, that is, last month when I was devastated to discover my love's shadow side.
You see, my baby son, he nearly died and everyone said that my darling was responsible. I couldn't see any way of us staying together after suspecting my love of inflicting such cruelty upon my child. At the same time, I was deeply saddened that we might be parted. It made me realise how compatible we were together and how grateful I was to my beloved - not for nearly killing my baby - but for showing us such generosity, warmth and kindness since we were rejoined. I ultimately decided to give my love, Brazil, another chance after doctors concurred that my son's malaise was triggered on the flight from London, and not here.
I believe that, for a relationship to work, one's negatives should be tolerable to the other person and, simultaneously, dazzlingly outweighed by one's attributes. The same could be said for a country. For me, Brazil's good points - its wildness, colour, cool, unerring sense of fun, endless dancing, its humour, exuberance, impulsivity, free-spiritedness, late-to-bed-late-to-rise mentality, its tolerance, spirituality, esoterics, dramatism, romance, all-embracing warmth and simmering sexual tension far outweigh its dirty, chaotic, corrupt and temperamental faults.
I can't say whether this love is eternal, I just know that it feels true.