I am back in the Old World, back in Europe, back in Germany, back to the apartment that I most recently call home. In my ears my ambient-electronic Spotify playlist is pumping Asura’s Atlantic Child. It is powerful, dreamy, strong, engaging, with the rhythm of love it delivers me from my stressed-out academic thoughts (partly also thanks to a deadline extension – Thank God for that one!). 

It is funny how much music affects our thoughts. I guess this is why there are cheesy love songs, the reason people vacuum clean to heavy metal, why Mozart supposedly makes us smarter (I need a few more of these experiments before I succumb to this hypothesis) and why we all feel a little when we hear “Somebody I used to know” by Goyte. 

While in Brazil an ex send me an email telling me to be wary not to use credit cards online. It is the first contact he has initiated since we broke up (months and months and months ago). It was not even addressed to me but a mass mail to, I suppose, everyone he knows. Not sure what to make of it I decided to perceive it as “I care about you, or at least your financial situation”. The hilarious irony that out of anything he could have said to me this is the topic he picked strikes me with an apathetic feeling of alienation. I guess that proves my point, that music like Goyte’s capture how we feel.

Strangely in contrast, the passionate samba of Brazil lingers. The intense exotic dream I was so sure that I would simply wake up from without a care in the world, still remains. Feelings and experiences that I assumed would simply fade away lingers in my thoughts, in my heart. Maybe it is still that part of morning when dreams lives on, or maybe some dreams are not meant to be forgotten. The heat on my skin, the smell of the ocean, the sand between my toes, those delicious half-baked orange egg-and-coconut jellies; that bittersweet uniqueness that only Brazil ever has offered me. 

The trip back from Brazil was not as smooth as the one there (maybe the universe is telling me that I should have stayed). The flight from Rio to Amsterdam was pleasant enough but the food was a disaster (shape up KLM!). All three of us in the row asked for beef instead of fish, but ended up getting something completely unidentifiable. The debate went: is it chicken that tastes like fish or fish with the consistency of chicken? It turned out that it was indeed the fish (I’m still not entirely convinced) and that the airline only mixed up the plates. The dessert was another low-mark, only describable as white liquid sugar covered in almond flour, it too was also left mostly uneaten.

While food is a big deal for me the biggest problem was that the plane arrived late in Amsterdam. We had 30 minutes before our connecting flight departed. I noticed that according to the monitors, it would take us 29 minutes to walk between terminal G to terminal B. Setting of in a semi-run we managed to arrive just before they closed the gate – cosmopolitan as we are! Of course, there was no chance in the world that our luggage could make the same trip. 

Being back home is comfort. I can cook my own food, paint, sleep in my own bed. But sitting here all I can do is wait for a phone call that tells me that my backpack with all my stuff too has joined me here and not escaped back to where it was warm and pleasurable.