A very slow day

So it’s another perfect winter's day in Sao Paulo, the last in a long bright string of them. A sky so flawless it stills you inside. The wind scouring out thought and blowing rags of sunlight into impossible corners. It’s been very quiet around here lately. The city has emptied itself for the long vacation. The spate of intense work which I had throughout May and June has slowly ebbed away until I’m basically unemployed but without the final sign-off which would oblige me to get on with something else. My wife is also at liberty, on her summer holidays. So our days have reduced their focus to smaller acts – getting breakfast, venturing out to buy food, getting hold of a new lamp for the living room, speaking to our families at home in Britain, making dinner, eating a peach. Small victories have become important once again. We dream vividly and discuss whatever remains most vivid when we wake. Our dreams and the TV shows we’re binging on in the evenings seem more real than what we think of as our lives, the occupations we pursue in the outside world, our responsibilities. Reality has retreated. It is confusing. It feels as if the layers of my mind have become transparent glass, and I can look down through pellucid depths, reading each layer simultaneously, the meanings overlapping and making no sense except cumulatively, as the wholeness of a dream, unbound by the linearities of reason. One should enjoy these moments, but they make me feel guilty, anxious. There is occasionally the scratch of fear. It’s an effort to let go.