Brazil Finds Lightness in a World That Feels So Bleak

When the old sodium streetlights came on at dusk, the world outside turned from full color into a yellow monochrome. As a child, this moment always made the writer feel sad. One evening, his father asked why he grew so quiet. The boy could not explain how he felt. The evening was just starting, the ditch outside was freezing, and people’s breath hung in the cold air.

“Let’s get an ice cream in the village,” his father said. The boy sat on the back of his bicycle as the yellow world passed by. People on the streets had lost their color. They arrived at the shop just before it closed. Outside, standing under one of the lanterns, his father held his bike in the snow and ate an ice cream with sprinkles. “Lekker he?” he said, meaning “Delicious, huh?” The boy felt his father was saying, “We are both feeling this together, aren’t we?”

Growing older

The writer is now thirty years old. It has been ten years since his father died of cancer. Looking back, growing up felt like those evenings when the sodium lights came on. With time, the world lost some of its color. Broken hearts, bad decisions, dreams that never came true, words left unspoken. Time leaves its marks, and nobody escapes it. The question became: how can someone hold onto color, resist growing bitter, and stay light-hearted like a child?

In his twenties, the writer tried many things to fight off embitterment. He lost himself in philosophy, the arts, powerlifting, trading, traveling, filmmaking, and writing. He stayed busy, stayed up late, and tried to learn new things and new perspectives. It felt like the search for meaningful answers could justify the suffering in life. One of his mentors in art school told him, “Being a romantic in this world is one of the hardest things you can do.” He did not understand at the time, but the words made sense years later.

Facing the unknown

The more the writer searched, the bleaker the world seemed. The sodium-lamp feeling stopped being something that happened only in the evenings. It became a constant presence. The colors did not come back in the mornings anymore. He reached a point where he felt he had exhausted his known world. Every answer he found produced a bleaker world than the one before it. During that time, he spoke to a woman who was light and full of color. She always seemed to smile. They talked about many things, and she always chose the light, never dismissing the weight of their conversations but responding with a smile or a joke. “Aren’t you simply a man who comes and goes, exploring as genuinely as he can?” she asked. “If so, why not continue exploring?”

The writer realized that in his search for answers, he had stopped searching for questions. The unknown had become his enemy. But when he had nothing left to lose, he found he could go anywhere and do anything. The unknown became the only place that still felt alive. He and his love walked backwards for two months across northern Spain on the Camino de Santiago, to feel what it meant to embrace the unknown. They were constantly ready for catastrophe because they could not see where they were going. But with enough slowing down, nothing terrible happened. The unknown stopped feeling like a threat. They felt lighter, freer, and more present. They left Amsterdam and moved to the campo of Panama to experience real solitude, far from anything familiar. In that solitude, the writer faced everything he had been running from: the unwillingness to accept things as they are, the need to be something in a world that felt bleak, and the frantic desire to make sense of it all.

Finding the ice cream

Learning about his father through the stories of others, the writer discovered that his father had struggled with existence just as much as he had. He just never saw it. His father was the person who knew everything and could fix anything. But on that particular night, his father knew what he was going through. He did not try to fix it or explain it. Instead, he got on his bike and rode them to the ice cream shop. The writer thinks about that now, not about the ice cream itself, but about the refusal to let the monochrome win. His father did not fight the sodium lanterns or pretend the world was not turning colorless. He just decided that was not a good enough reason to skip out on vanilla with sprinkles.

One evening, sitting in the sun with his love in Panama, overlooking the heights of Volcán Barú as day turned into night, the writer caught himself saying, “Lekker he?” He realized that in that moment, he was living in the same place his father had been all along. Not above the world, not against it, but inside it, enjoying something nice, next to someone he loves.