Don't Forget to Write

"Saudades"

A while later Bob came back to while all of my friends were distracted. He poured each of us a shot of Irish whiskey. "We had a spirit from your home, now we will have one from mine." We took the shots. "You know, lad, ain't nothing more dangerous, nor more inspired, then a man with nothing to lose. You are that man now. Use that."

"So, you gonna do this thing or what?" Karen chimed in. I had forgotten she was sitting next to me.

"Do what?"

"Write some fiction!"

"Ah, so he's a writer," Bob said from his leaned position on the other side of the bar.

"Write some fiction? Where did that come from?"

"Well, you once said you'd like to make a living off of writing, and since you can't do it from the library anymore, why not do it from a story?"

"I told you, I don't do that. I'm not good at it."

"I've read one of your stories, it's good."

"What? When?"

"That one night around Halloween when you and Bruno had all of us over before we went to the party, I snooped through your room and stole a short story from that folder on your desk."

"What the hell Karen."

"It was really good! It was about this special force veteran who became homeless. I loved it. Except for the end. The end was too sad for my liking. It almost made me cry. Maybe you should write some lighter stuff, stuff that is less depressing."

"Life is depressing. We're born to die. It's the human curse. Hopefully somewhere between those two days we do some things that made it all worth it."

"Geez, that's dismal."

I shrugged.

"Okay, so maybe things do tend to end in bad ways, and maybe life is pretty sad a lot of the time, but each ending is only the beginning to something else. And the beginnings of things tend to be pretty happy and positive. Besides, you can choose to see the bad, or choose to see the good."

"I don't think that's true. I think you either choose to see what you want to see, or you choose to see what's real, at least through your own lens. I think there's more bad than good in the world, but it's not really a bad thing, because having more bad helps us appreciate the good. Everybody you meet is going through hell, or has done so in the past. Everybody has their dark times. Why should we pretend it doesn't exist? Why shouldn't we be honest about life? Show somebody that they aren't the only depressed suicidal maniac on the block. Life is sad and torturous for everybody, but nobody ever wants to talk about it. Can't we all try to be a bit more honest about ourselves?"

"You're one to talk!" Karen said. "You're one of the most guarded people I know. you haven't even talked about school, Camila, or your dad. At all."

"I'm talking about it now. I don't know. I'm not good at conveying the stuff." Karen rolled her eyes at me.

"Well," Bob said, "how do you feel now, Peter? Emotions are complicated, single words like 'sad' or 'happy' don't do justice to the human condition, do they?"

I shrugged and thought for a moment. "Do you remember when you were in grade school, and on Sunday afternoon, right before the sunset, those last few hours of the day turned the sky orange and purple. Right before nightfall. And you got that feeling in the pit of your stomach? It wasn't necessarily sadness, or dreading for school the next day. More like a feeling of longing for, well... for something that you don't have yet, but you thought you did? Longing for a time that has passed, or time that might come. A longing for those times when you felt most alive? Like the feeling you get now sometimes when you suddenly hear all of the sounds and see all of the colors and experience the world fully with every single one of your senses for a brief second, and you're filled with a joy for existence in this moment, in this world. But then you realize that this moment of mindful clarity is slipping away, and for a second you think, 'man, didn't I feel like this all of the time when I was a kid?' And maybe you did, maybe you didn't, but you just know that the feeling exists, and you long for it, you long to do the things that bring you closer to that feeling of absolute clarity and experiencing the world around you, even when you do have it because it's what you're always striving for, whether you realize it or not?" Karen looked confused, but Bob held my gaze, internalizing it all. "In Portuguese, there's a word, saudades. It doesn't have a literal translation to English, but it's similar to what I said. It's a feeling that sailors know. They feel saudades for land and for their family when they are out to sea, never knowing if they would return. But, they also feel saudades for the sea, with all of its dangers and uncertainties, when they're back on land. In the same way soldiers feel saudades for home when they are deployed, but also might feel it for the battlefield, with its gunshots, it's explosions, it's horrors. Because that fear of death and god and that experience was a moment when they were fully alive. It's a feeling that a great musician, one who tours the world in a private jet and sleeps in luscious hotel rooms, has for their first road tour, before they were famous, when they were sleeping on couches and driving a shitty minivan. It is a longing to feel more than your heart will let you, to feel the, good and bad and everything in between, all at once. I think that's what I feel. I feel saudades for Camila because I have this feeling that there could have been more. I feel it for school, because I had a plan, I was smart enough to make something of myself in the academic world, and now not only have I fucked it up, but I'm seeing that school might have only been a false dream for someone like me. I feel it for soccer, and how I've played my last competitive game, but I didn't know it at the time. I feel it for my family, or at least, what I thought my family was. Back when I was a kid and dad was a hero and mom was a saint. I feel it especially for my dad, and for the person I thought he was, for the terrible shit he did, for hitting me or ignoring me for most of my life, but also for the good, for raising me right when he could. For the person he could have been. For the man I wish I knew better and all of the things I would have said and done if I knew how much it would fucking hurt when he was gone. I feel it when I think about my childhood, when everything was an adventure, and nothing was mundane. When the world was ruled by magic and nothing needed to make sense." I looked down.

"Peter," Bob said, "Joao used to talk about that, the saudades. He said it's the root of some of the finest music he had ever heard. Use it. Write it down. Do something with it. You are worth more than the sum of your parts, my friend. More than a student, or an athlete, or a son, or a friend. Put everything together and create something out of it."

We drank a lot that night, and the alcohol almost made me forget that I was sad. When Bob yelled "LAST CALL!" We weren't ready to stop drinking, so me, Bruno, Moose, Diane, and Karen all walked back to the apartment and drank there. At some point just before the sunrise Diane and Bruno had snuck into Bruno's room, and Moose had fallen asleep on the futon.