Even Better Than the Real Thing

After nearly five months away, Brazil finally appeared in my dreams on Tuesday. Except it looked like a Miami theme park of Rio de Janeiro. Or maybe a theme park in Dubai. Fernando my usual taxi driver in Rio was driving me around the city, except that he was a Dubai theme park version of Fernando. Slicker, less scrawny, and his car was newer, larger. We stopped at several rodas de samba where I chatted with the musicians in Portuguese. This part of the dream was pretty authentic. They were playing in concrete-walled bars with a few plastic tables and chairs scattered around, just like the real things.

I've been back in the United States about five months now, and I'm more confused by life than ever.

In my dream, however, life was simple. I understood how the musicians operated, even how the Dubai theme park version of Fernando worked. I woke up from the dream feeling intense sorrow, about what I'd given up, haunted by memories. But then I lay in bed for a few more minutes thinking about the actual street in Rio I lived on, about the foreignness I felt about the place then even after three years living there, and realized, "That was just a dream. Rio in real life wasn't really that simple."

But I still carry that dream around with me. As I painfully launch a new life here in my supposedly native country, Brazil is still the simpler time I'll always long for. Even if it actually wasn't.