Breathing You

Table of Contents

Introduction

Love Letters I

Love Letters II

Love Letters III

Love Letters IV

Like Buddha

Always Close

Longing

Dialogue From a Separation

A Talk With Him

Family Secret

Missing Oneself

New York, New York

On Loss

Alien, The Internal Passenger

Bridges and Losses

Of Love and Peace

Three O'clock in The Morning

Passing

Codes

Welcome Letters

A Conversation Between a Couple

Expiration Date

To Simplify

Differences

A Box of Responses

Anxiety

Four Women, Four Cultures, The Same Desire!

Direction

AAA

Perception Is Not Always Reality

Time, Age, Maturity

Saturday Night

Listening to The Stars

Why Hope?

Breathing

Rarified Air

Wherever I Go

Don’t Be Afraid

In The Middle of The Night

They Loved Each Other, But

Without Pity

Again

When She Left

Dreams Lost

Acknowledgements

Biography

This book is dedicated to my mother, Dona Creme,

a model of faith, strength, and transcendence;

to my sister Ana Luiza, a great motivator:

to my children, Laila, Bruno, Nathália, and Júlia,

sources of joy, learning, and growth.

INTRODUCTION

The chronicles of Antonio Augusto, the love letters, dramatic dialogues, the depositions, and the precise emotional interventions, borrow various narrative techniques sanctified in the history of romance. Like an epiphany, Antonio Augusto treads lightly and attentive, to avoid the trivial and expose the attics of the human experience through a series of elliptical surprises that approach the sublime. It is no small accomplishment.

All the situations can occur here, there, in all the places that serve as a setting for a man that is prepared and has an awareness of his future – certainly, unlike a man of   the past century. A character (and what a character!) comes to the following conclusion: I’m God, not a fortune-teller. God might be immense and great, but the one who really knows the future, the real future, is man himself because he makes it. Antonio Augusto appears to embody the myth of the new man, sensitive, masculine, intelligent, analytical, spiritual, generous, a mensch, capable of smiling about tragic faults so that in the end he can overcome them.

Reinaldo Amaro Mesquita

Psycholgist and playwright

LOVE LETTERS I

My Dear Helena,

I write this letter after a lot of time has passed, and I sent it by mail, snail mail. Sending it by email would be risky and diminished. Too fast, too virtual, and would run the risk of an immediate response, which would be another surprise.

This letter has memories, and the memories should have a place on the paper, which will yellow with time, wear down, but will maintain the feeling recorded there in the text, with the stains and the aroma of time.

It was very difficult when you left. I was at the mercy of your silence, your questions, your anguish, the doubt, and what might have been. As that famous Portuguese writer once said: You woke me to life and didn’t complete the job.

I still feel like an unfinished project, a book whose last chapters were lost and whose author disappeared. Once in a while, I stumble across a page lost here or there, but it’s one more piece of a jigsaw puzzle to be put back together. I’ve learned to live with myself, with your silence and with my loneliness. But that smile that you were always stealing, I haven’t been able to replicate. Maybe it’s a way of keeping the sorrow or providing an homage to everything we were. I don’t know, and I have no way of knowing without you near me.

Time passes and I give up looking for word from you, I give up waiting and go on my way – it’s not the way I wanted, but it’s what fate has given me --, but I always feel that there is still something to say to break the silence that you left.

Waking to life, I wake to love; I loved. I loved and felt the sweet taste of finding and the bitter taste of leaving. But I loved deeply, profoundly.

I hope that you have found the peace you were looking for, and that you’ve kept the smile that woke me.

Miguel

____________________

Dear Miguel,

Your letter reopened my Pandora’s box, where I carefully kept everything we were. The emotions blossomed again and overflowed. Yes, you always make me overflow, lose control, reason, and purpose. I always lost myself in you and it was always so difficult to find myself again. It was so difficult dealing with your imperfections and your silence. Desperate, is what your silence made me, and I felt the scent of abandonment. In your silence, I found all my phantoms, my fears; it was dynamite that could explode my dreams, and I couldn’t endure the possibility of being abandoned by you. 

In my desperation and in the pain that surrounded me, the only form of freedom I found was to escape. And I did escape: from you, from me, from us, from our dreams, and everything we’d planned together. 

Was it better this way? I don’t know. But there will always be questions without responses. 

The silence that I left also stayed with me; the smile that charmed you will always be yours, only yours.

Helena

LOVE LETTERS II

Elisa,

Six months have passed since I arrived in Antarctica. For you maybe the time has passed quickly, but I’ve discovered that hell is freezing cold and I need heat badly. Not plain and simple heat, but human warmth, or better yet, your particular warmth. I miss you so much. I miss you so much it is literally painful!

I’ll tell you, Elisa, lost in this infinite white immensity, these short days and long nights, one has time to reflect, meditate about living, about the two of us, about me, about your issues and about the future.

There’s no better way to cultivate empathy than being lonely in the freezing cold! I was thinking or, better yet, I felt and discovered that many of your complaints about me were true.

I had trouble expressing my emotions, opening myself up to this sea of feeling that you poured