“It’s been a long, long time since I’ve memorized your face
It’s been four hours now since I’ve wandered through your place
And when I sleep on your couch, I feel very safe
And when you bring the blankets, I cover up my face

I do love you
I do, ooh-ooh, love you”
“Futile Devices” by Sufjan Stevens

Have you ever heard of the marvelous and incredibly tasty brand of cereal called Neston? I discovered recently that Neston doesn’t exist outside of Brasil, I never felt such pity for those foreigners! Neston is like what you would call oatmeal, but it uses more grains than just oats and the porridge you can make with it is way more liquid and… Well, it’s one of the wonders of the world where you will have to just try and imagine how it is. I used to make it all the time when I was a kid, but I would always mess the ingredients up, which would make my little porridge too dense and not liquid at all! I would always end up throwing it away and my mom wasn’t very happy with it, so we wouldn’t have it in the house all the time. Around the beginning of the year, I asked my grandmother to buy some. On another note, I was feeling way lighter then. There was a good feeling that was haunting me and I was feeling like a kinder person. Remember this adjective. Around that time, also, I met a girl. We felt very good when we talked to each other, and it felt like an unique exchange in my life. So I tried to do some Neston and, for the first time in my life after remembering being so pissed off in my previous attempts, I checked the packaging for any indication of the correct number of Neston-filled spoons for the porridge. And there it was! It was four. Four spoonfuls of Neston. So I tried it and wouldn’t you know: it was perfect. So I ran to her and commented it because I was so happy. My life wasn’t filled with extraordinary events, so these little victories that felt stored in the back for so long were everything to me. These ties that feel older than any memory I have. Somehow, I felt there was only one person I needed to talk to about that: someone who wasn’t present through any of those old memories. But it felt important to me that she had to be on this one. I wanted her to be present in every victory from my life from that moment onwards, since every step I was making in those times was motivated from her words. When we stopped talking, something funny happened. I never made a good Neston again. I used to make them well all the time, and then suddenly it wasn’t feeling right anymore. It was always an excess of something. Too much sugar, too much powdered milk, too much Neston… It was gone, away from me again.

Pretty intense for just a bowl of Neston, right? Yeah, I see it now. I had to go through things that were way more intense to realize that I was living in a world and in a head that shouldn’t be mine. You think you can act rationally, but there is nothing rational about this kind of love. There’s no going back too. You lose something every day when you feel this way, and at the end of it you look back expecting to see some trail but it stopped leaking out of you a long time ago. You’re all out of you, lost in the middle of someone else’s dense forest of meaning. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about today. Kind of. I wanted to talk about kindness.

You see, around the beginning of the year I was starting to be very interested and attracted to the abstract concept of kindness. I started to be in love with the people around me and I noticed that the aspect that I loved the most about all of them could be reduced and described as this single word. The people I loved the most seemed to have this little animal driving around in their heart that motivated them to be innocent, to be open to the world, to be kind to others just because. I felt that was so beautiful I could cry, I was convinced that some people I met in college were so pretty inside I could just stare for hours at their hearts like you would do a painting in a museum, trying to see how the artist got to those conclusions. What made the brushstrokes look soft here, harsh there, what went in the choice of the colors… Their souls were beautifully kind and all I wished was to be like this once in my life. To be truly kind.

If you read enough texts I write when I’m pissed at myself, you’ll see that one of the first things I call me out for is how hateful my kind of love can really be. That’s just me trying to say to myself that I’ll never be able to be truly kind. I don’t really hate anyone, but the way I love others isn’t pure. It feels dirty. And not in a sexual way, of course, but in an unholy sense. The type of love for the world I seek to have is of an innocence that feels lost to me, and it has been this way for a long time. I look at these people and their minds are so simple, sometimes. A friend of mine from college, one of the first people not from my family I truly admired, felt like a child sometimes even though he was many years older than me. There was some magic to that back then. The things he seemed to love about other people seemed very simple and mundane. He didn’t seem to admire people for outlandish characteristics or for their excesses. He loved them because of things that they would not even realize could be good qualities. It felt pure to me, so genuine that it made me want to be his friend. He pulled everyone to his orbit by being very singularly kind. He would deny if I ever said that there was something innocent about him because of how he lived his life, but I would mean this as a compliment. I have to admit, I don’t feel exactly this way about him now. He changed a bit. I still love him, though, and I don’t take back my read on the guy. Times have just changed.

Being kind means many things. My friend Lily, for example, is one of the kindest there is. Every time we talk she says “I was just talking about you with my boyfriend” (who is my longtime friend I met back when I was 13) and I get all flustered every time. How can you remember of my existence when we’re away from each other, just like I do yours? This friend of mine does the same and he always tries to make me feel better when I’m at my worse. They can love me. They can love me so much. And I feel like this is an act of kindness beyond my understanding. How can they love me so much, care about me so much? It’s because they’re kind. They don’t think about doing kind acts, it’s just a consequence of being like this.

This remembers me of a girl friend of mine who, after knowing that I wanted to learn guitar for my dream of putting my songs in an instrument to become true, offered herself to pay for a guitar we found on Amazon. She convinced two other friends of mine to share the total and now I have a guitar in my house. How? Why? Why would someone even do such a thing? For me, even. What did I ever do that could warrant such a good deed? What did I ever do that could attract these beautiful people in my life?

I remember talking about this to my therapist on our last session and she wanted me to describe better this “kindness” I saw in other people and not in myself. I quickly reminded myself of this exchange I had with this girl I talked to on the beginning of the year.

It was her birthday, I think. She probably had went out with her friends, so she left me unanswered for a while during the night. This was during a time we were still talking all the time, so it felt strange. It felt incomplete to love this person so much, to try to be kind to her and to be so… absent during such a beautiful day to celebrate her existence. She was celebrating it with actual people, present by her side. This bothered me a bit, and to notice that was when I started to realize how much of a crazy man I was becoming. I felt I was still on control of this love, but there was always a distance way bigger than any piece of land could measure, but she could. She could very well, as she probably did measure it every time we talked. She didn’t felt to me like a person that would just close her eyes when at sea and try to feel how her body felt once she could feel like floating there. She would only close her eyes to blink in this sea. To realize this was to realize we were more different than I thought. I was a crazy man disguised as a romantic, she was a house designed to withstand hurricanes. As I would sing in an old song of mine, “I could never win, but she could still lose”.

As I was feeling lost, I stayed awake for a while. It was in these days that I would see how this was going to end, so it kept me awake for a while. I was right about the end, of course. I’m very good at predicting disasters. But she appeared out of nowhere asking if I was awake. I replied I was, and she said she was in distress. She had witnessed a homeless man being assaulted by a group of policemen that were outside of her apartment. She saw it through the window, apparently he screamed something at the time and it caught her attention. He supposedly had just tried to rob someone on the streets and the cops were trying to “teach him a lesson”. He seemed like he was in pain. She seemed so sad because of that, so I calmed her down. I talked so much, you probably forgot why I’m even telling you this. It’s because I’m giving my therapist an example of kindness, where it has on someone I admire and it lacks in me. She reacted very differently to how I would’ve reacted had I saw that event.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like the idea of cops being vigilantes and torturing a homeless person for attempted robbery. It’s not because the person “deserves it”. I would just… Not care. I know that because it happens sometimes where I live, it has been this way ever since I was little. I live in a favela, so sometimes you hear people screaming something or some sort of violence happening. You just have to ignore it most of the times because they’re not cops, they’re thugs. I trained myself to be indifferent to those moments, to mind my business, so they wouldn’t get me. But who am I kidding? True kindness can never be expurged from your body. If I was truly kind I wouldn’t be afraid of them to help any poor soul suffering. But then again, I grew up in a place where every single time I wanted to go outside I had to pass through a lot of thugs surrounding this piece of the street, with their enormous guns and little radios. To make them not mess with you, you had to train yourself to ignore them. Put some earphones, pretend you’re just looking forward. Every day you leave to go somewhere you have to go through them. Sometimes, if you come back very late, they stop you. They search your purses or your bags, ask where you live, even search your phone for any conversations with any thug from a different favela that has a different crime organization. I don’t wish them to die, but I learned to not care about their existence. If they were suffering in the streets, I don’t know if I would do something to help them or if I would just keep looking forward with my earphones.

But there she was. She didn’t care if the guy was a thug or something, if he had really tried to rob someone. All she cared was that she heard a yell of suffering and she felt uneasy. Again, the problem is not that I would feel joy. The problem is that I’m not good enough to care about every being like this. She felt so lost about what to do to help the poor guy and I genuinely wanted to help her and him, but I had never been in that situation so I froze. I wouldn’t know what to do. She called the police or the public ambulance service, but not even then she felt better because they were unhelpful. She was so sad to see that poor man suffering. And I felt a heart inside of me that I hadn’t felt beating in a long time when I saw that I, too, cared for that man. I just didn’t know. And I wouldn’t know on my own. I needed these beautiful people to remind me of what kindness is. I wasn’t kind on my own. So that is true kindness to me. A kindness that you don’t need reminding of. It’s just inherent to your existence, it’s attached to your heart like a little Jesus, and it can’t be let go or erased.

About the Neston, though, I just made some. There is almost a full little bag of it here, since I stopped making it after I unlearned how to do it well. It was stored untouched until today. I have to say, it’s quite funny. I think I finally did it well this time. After so long, the Neston wasn’t so bad. It probably tasted just like the most delicious ones I would do back then. But something was missing. It felt so bland. It was just some grains and milk and sugar, it wasn’t much. I finally got the recipe right and I realized it can never be like the Nestons from earlier this year. They all had this little seasoning on them that kept them holy, that kept them tasty. And it is now gone forever, it doesn’t taste anything like it used to. I asked my grandmother to throw it away, even though we had a good amount of it. I wouldn’t do it again for a long time. I felt like I wouldn’t get that seasoning again, from another person, for a long time.

“And when you play guitar, I listen to the strings buzz
The metal vibrates underneath your fingers
And when you crochet, I feel mesmerized and proud
And I would say I love you, but saying it out loud is hard

So I won’t say it at all
And I won’t stay very long
But you are the life I needed all along
I think of you as my brother
Although that sounds dumb
And words are futile devices”
“Futile Devices” by Sufjan Stevens