Perdida

By Letícia Oliveira

Helena doesn’t live in a city but in a memory. Passing through poor neighborhoods, she remembers her grandparents’ house, so small that it barely fit when all the family wanted to gather inside. If she walks into a coffee shop, she remembers the jazz playing in the background that her best friend used to love, dancing with clumsy steps. If she sees someone begging for donations, she remembers the first time she received a coin from her aunt to buy candy. If she interrupts her trip to refuel her car, she remembers the first time she saw a hitch-hiker on the side of the road, with his big, threadbare coat and his thumb up, asking for a ride. If she sees a couple walking holding hands, she may remember the times her father beat her mother.

Helena walks through the shadows of her dreams. When she dreams of sunsets, it’s as if they’re all repetitions of the same day, evoking memories barely distinguishable from one another, Helena has to dig for differing details. When she walks toward the sun, she notices the nuances between the memories, which increase as the sun takes on the different shades of twilight. Yellow, the old woman growing flowers in the house next door. Orange, the taste of liquor, and the lovers who were always leaving. Blue, the uncertain walk of the immigrant searching for her memory, or trying to remember if she left it on the deck because it was too hard to carry it.

Helena cries as if she had lost the love of her life forever. She remembers the dances and the memories of colorful, happy days when she walked holding hands, feeling passion streaming through her body. Not even those are capable of comforting her. Only death is the release of all pain, she thinks, as she returns to the sad house where she dreams of her cities. She cannot distinguish the pains of her childhood traumas from the pains of the present, it’s the same agony prolonged and administered in doses that make it more bearable, but no less intolerable. Helena knows that she’ll suffer for the rest of her life.

Helena feels the indifference to those who die in the cold and in battle as if it was she who had died. Her thin hands cannot bear the weight of her cowardice, but they can endure the winter. That’s why her parents always expect her back. Helena can bear the heat of the fireplace warming her hand in proximity dangerous to her skin, but she cannot subject herself to the abominable flames of indifference. Helena feels an itch in her feet and the impetus that calls her out into the world as the spring equinox approaches.

Helena knows that cities are an invitation to leave. If you stay too long, you’ve lost your purpose and will, so you’re already certain to go. When Helena arrives in a city, her entrance evokes all the remarkable goodbyes she has ever witnessed, just as it does with anyone who enters there. And the leaving provokes a kind of nostalgia for all the places not yet visited. If Helena arrives in a city, she feels like staying, because she seems to have known it for a long time. If she leaves, she goes quickly and runs, because she has left long before she knows it.

---

Letícia Oliveira is Brazilian, a psychology student, and passionate about literature.

Featured art: Sinking by Sophie Caswell