Round The Corner.

Just back from a trip round the corner to the gas station to buy some water. It’s a little after twilight, newly dark, and the pavements are thinning though the roads are still choked with stationary traffic, belching trucks, vacant faces in bus windows. What I want to think about is why I get such a sharp little thrill from these moments out in the city on my own. It’s not the city which does it. Sao Paulo is far too ugly, big and unmistakably western for anyone to romanticise it as either beautiful or extraordinary. There are no hooded lepers begging for change, no muezzins calling the faithful to prayer, only poor people working hard, occasional beggars and prostitutes discernible among the regular folk and those random outbreaks of violent crime which everyone prays not to get caught up in. So, no, what I get off on at such moments is not the city itself but the sensation which I get at such moments of being far away, immeasurably far away. Accomplishing something so mundane as buying water here, with its autopilot assumptions of where to go, who might be working at the gas station tonight and what I will say, brings sharply into focus the extent to which I have become embedded in a place and a life which has no connection, and no knowledge, of the country I am from. This is liberating, and I feel the weightlessness of it for a second as I’m wandering home through the exhaust fumes and glare of headlights: the possibility that I have, at least for now, escaped.