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Learning to Walk Without the Map I Drew for Us

For a long time, loss did not feel like an ending. It felt provisional, temporary, as if life itself were holding its breath with me. I carried the quiet conviction that what had been interrupted could still be resumed — that there was an earlier version of the world waiting patiently for my return, unchanged, intact. I moved through days as though rehearsing, not living, convinced that at some point the doors would reopen and I would simply step back into the life I had imagined continuing.

That illusion was difficult to surrender because it was gentle. It did not scream or collapse dramatically; it lingered. It asked very little of me except patience. And so I waited. I walked streets whose pavements remembered our conversations. I crossed intersections where I had once pictured our shadows overlapping. The city became a museum of anticipated moments, and I behaved like a devoted visitor, preserving what was never fully real.

What finally dissolved the illusion was not a single event, but exhaustion. The fatigue of waiting without being met. The dull ache of directing energy towards someone who stood still, not out of certainty but fear. I began to see how much colour had drained from my days — not because the world had dimmed, but because I had narrowed my gaze to a single, unresponsive point.

Letting go was not heroic. It was quiet and almost accidental. One day I stopped imagining explanations. Another day I stopped checking. Then, without ceremony, I stopped arranging my life around a possibility that refused to choose me.

The streets changed after that. Or perhaps I did. The same routes began to show details I had overlooked: the uneven rhythm of footsteps at rush hour, the sudden brightness of shop windows at night, the way the city breathes differently when you are no longer waiting for someone to arrive beside you. I had to relearn colour — not as nostalgia, but as presence. What once felt washed out by expectation regained texture once I released the future I had been postponing myself for.

I started listening to new music, not because I needed novelty, but because my ears were finally open. Sounds no longer had to compete with imagined conversations. I walked unfamiliar streets without assigning them symbolic weight. Cafés were just cafés. Parks were simply places to sit and exist. There was relief in this ordinariness, in allowing spaces to belong to themselves again.

I finally ended that wait that arose purely from my hope of seeing you. Now I hope I never run into you again, because I have finally accepted that all our business is finished. I don’t want to see you. Not in the square, not on the street, not at the market. I no longer waste my time dreaming of meeting your gaze among the lights of dusk.

I realised how deeply being ignored had shaped my perception. How the absence of response had trained me to doubt my own vividness. Now, without that constant background noise of waiting, things appeared sharper. Light reflected differently. Words landed more clearly. I did not feel louder or more urgent — only more real.

Melancholy remains, but it has changed its posture. It no longer pulls me backwards; it stands beside me, observant, almost companionable. It reminds me of what I once hoped for, without demanding that I rebuild it. The past is no longer a destination. It is a reference point, useful only insofar as it clarifies what I will not repeat.

I am beginning again, not dramatically, not triumphantly, but honestly. I walk forward without rehearsing reunions that will never happen. I make room for memories that have not yet been lived. And in this unclaimed space — free of expectation, free of silence imposed by another — I feel something steady and unmistakable.

Not the joy of return, but the quieter happiness of arrival.


We take a chance from time to time
And put our necks out on the line
And you have broken every promise that we made
And I have loved you anyway

Took a fine time to leave me hangin' out to dry
Understand now I'm grieving
So don't you waste my time
Cause you have taken
All the wind out from my sails
And I have loved you just the same

We finally find this
Then you're gone
Been chasing rainbows all along
And you have cursed me
When there's no one left to blame
And I have loved you just the same
And you have broken every single fucking rule
And I have loved you like a fool

Between the Last Day and the Next Breath

The year closes not with a sound but with a thinning, like breath against cold glass. Days gather themselves into corners, into receipts and wilted calendars, into the residue of things once said and not answered. Time has grown porous. It seeps through me. I find it everywhere: in the pause between steps, in the small ache behind the eyes, in the way afternoon light hesitates before it abandons the room.

I have been counting without numbers. Not the achievements, nor the griefs — those insist on their own arithmetic — but the intervals. The spaces where nothing happened and yet something was decided. A year, I discover, is not a line but a tide that recedes unevenly, leaving behind objects that were never meant to be kept. A sentence begun and never finished. A name that no longer fits in the mouth. The memory of a laugh that seems to belong to someone else.

There is a peculiar intimacy to endings. They draw the world close, compress it. Streets become narrower; voices carry further. I walk through December as though through a house after a party — cups abandoned, a faint sweetness in the air, the sense that joy was here recently and has gone somewhere without explanation. What remains is not sadness exactly, but a listening. A waiting for the walls to speak.

Sometimes I think of the self I was in January, so certain, so loosely assembled. She believed in progress, in the gentle curve of improvement. Now she feels like a letter returned to sender, unopened. The year has written on me anyway: in tiredness, in a new caution of the heart, in the way I no longer rush to fill silences. Silence, I have learned, is not empty. It is crowded with what we cannot make useful.

At night, the mind loosens its grip. Thoughts drift like unmoored boats. There are moments when the question rises — quiet, almost polite — about endurance, about whether the labour of being is an obligation or a choice renewed each morning. I do not answer it. I let it hover, because answers are heavy things and I am already carrying enough.

Yet there are small resistances. The way tea warms the hands. The stubborn persistence of dawn. A sentence that arrives intact, asking to be written. These are not reasons, perhaps, but they are presences. They insist without arguing.

The year stands at the threshold now, shoes on, keys in hand. I watch it go with a feeling I cannot name — part relief, part mourning, part indifference sharpened into attention. What comes next is unwritten. Whether that is mercy or threat depends on how one looks at the blank page.

I close the window. The night remains. So does the possibility that tomorrow will ask again, and that I will answer — not with certainty, but with another step into the room, another breath taken without promise, without refusal.

The Quiet Relevance of Communism in an Unquiet Century

A Literary–Philosophical Reflection

There are moments in history when old ideas glow with a strangely renewed light. Not because the world has returned to them, but because the world has exhausted the alternatives. Communism — long treated as a relic, a tattered banner left on the battlefield of the twentieth century — has become, for many, precisely such an idea: abandoned, misunderstood, yet curiously luminous again. Its philosophical pulse can still be felt beneath the noise of our century, as if the spirit of an unrealised future continued to haunt the present.

Karl Marx wrote that capitalism transforms the world into a icy water of egotistical calculation, a phrase that gains a certain bitter clarity today. One need only walk through a modern metropolis — past the glass towers, the digital billboards that flicker like secular stained-glass, the silent camps of the homeless tucked beneath viaducts — to sense that something essential in the social fabric has thinned. Our era is one of unprecedented wealth and unprecedented loneliness; of technological marvels and spiritual destitution. And it is here that communist ideas, refracted through contemporary thinkers such as Nancy Fraser, David Harvey, Slavoj Žižek, and Thomas Piketty, acquire a resonance that is less ideological than existential.

I. The Fragile Commons of Human Life

Émile Durkheim once warned that societies cannot subsist on individualism alone; they collapse into anomie, a kind of moral wandering without compass or horizon. Today, the symptoms of such a condition are everywhere—alienation disguised as productivity, competition dressed up as virtue, and an epidemic of loneliness so profound that the World Health Organization now labels it a public health crisis.

Communism begins where much of our present despair begins: with the question of community, of the human need for bonds that no market contract can satisfy. It does not merely argue for redistribution; it argues that the human essence is fulfilled not in rivalry but in reciprocity. It imagines a society where solidarity is not an emergency measure reserved for crises, but the default mode of collective existence.

Communism, by contrast with neoliberalism, begins from the assumption that cooperative social relations — not competitive ones — are fundamental to human flourishing. Contemporary Marxist geographer David Harvey notes that capitalist accumulation corrodes community bonds by transforming every relation into an exchange relation, thereby generating systemic precarity and social fragmentation. In this regard, communist principles provide a theoretical counterweight: the social good is not a by-product of markets but the foundation of an organised society.

II. Inequality as a Slow Violence

The economist Piketty, with the austere patience of a scientist sorting fossils, has traced how wealth accumulates in ever tighter circles. His data reveal a pattern so consistent that it borders on the mythical: wealth begets wealth; poverty reproduces poverty. The gap widens, and the world tilts.

But literature reminds us of what statistics cannot say directly: that inequality is a quiet violence. It strips dignity, narrows horizons, and gnaws at the social psyche. Wilkinson and Picketty have shown that societies with great economic divides suffer higher rates of mental illness, homicide, and mistrust. The poor die earlier; the rich die surrounded by walls.

Communism’s critique, in this light, becomes less a dogma than an ethical reminder: that a society organised around massive inequality is, by definition, a society at war with itself. While full-scale state ownership is not the model contemporary scholars typically advocate, the communist critique of private capital concentration remains analytically indispensable.

III. Crime as the Shadow of Abandonment

The sociologist Loïc Wacquant writes of urban marginality as if it were a sprawling architecture of abandonment — zones where hope thins to a whisper. Crime, in this framework, is not a moral failure but a social echo. It arises where the social contract has been hollowed out, where the promises of citizenship have turned to dust.

Communist principles, with their insistence on eliminating structural deprivation, read like an attempt to silence that echo. A society that guarantees housing, education, healthcare, and dignified work does not need to police its citizens into obedience; it nurtures them into belonging.

There is something deeply poetic — if also painfully obvious — in the idea that safety is born not from surveillance, but from justice.

Empirical grounding supports this view: the Nordic countries — while not communist — have long adopted strong redistributive and social welfare mechanisms, and they consistently record some of the lowest crime rates in the world. Their outcomes lend weight to the broader principle: material egalitarianism produces safer societies.

IV. Education and the Human Condition

Amartya Sen’s philosophy of “capabilities” teaches that freedom is not merely the absence of constraint but the presence of conditions that allow one to blossom. Education and health are not commodities but the infrastructure of human dignity.

In this sense, communism, or at least its philosophical heart, speaks to a truth older than any ideology: that a society reveals its ethics through the way it treats the vulnerable. Access to health (as you can see in systems like SUS in Brazil or the NHS in the UK), free universities, public libraries — these institutions, though often battered, embody a simple, subversive idea: knowledge and life should not be rationed by wealth.

Empirical findings show that:

  • Universal, fully publicly funded healthcare systems reduce overall healthcare costs while improving outcomes.
  • Nations with free higher education exhibit higher levels of social mobility and innovation, contradicting claims that collectivised services suppress individual ambition.
  • Public investment in early childhood education yields some of the highest returns in economics, according to James Heckman’s long-term studies.

Communism’s insistence that education and health should exist outside the logic of profit appears not only morally compelling but empirically effective.

V. The Question of the Future

It is fashionable to say that communism has been tried and has failed. But this critique presupposes that capitalism has succeeded. Climate catastrophe, mass precarity, political cynicism, and the commodification of every crevice of human experience suggest otherwise.

Nancy Fraser argues that capitalism survives only by devouring the very things it depends upon: nature, care work, and human solidarity. The system is eating its own foundation. In contrast, communist thought — especially in its contemporary, non-authoritarian reinterpretations — asks us to imagine economies governed by the logic of sufficiency rather than accumulation, of cooperation rather than extraction. Yet even within mainstream economic research, the efficiency of public planning is increasingly recognised, especially in sectors where market incentives fail — public health, renewable energy, housing, and infrastructure.

Examples include:

  1. The success of worker cooperatives, such as the Mondragón Corporation in Spain, which operate according to principles aligned with democratic socialism and have demonstrated durable financial stability for decades.

2. Long-term industrial planning in China, responsible for the world’s largest poverty reduction in history — a point acknowledged even by economists not sympathetic to communism, such as Joseph Stiglitz.

The philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote of the “Not-Yet,” the shimmering horizon of unrealised possibilities that draws humanity forward. Communism, in this literary-philosophical sense, belongs to the Not-Yet. It is less a blueprint than a direction; less a programme than a longing for a world in which human life is not structured by the accident of birth or the brutality of markets.

Conclusion: The Idea That Refuses to Die

Perhaps communism endures not because it is perfect, but because it articulates something elemental about the human condition: our refusal to accept that suffering is natural; our stubborn hope that society can be arranged more rationally, more tenderly, more justly.

Its core principles — collective well-being, equitable distribution, universal access to life-sustaining services, and an economy oriented toward human needs rather than profit extraction — speak directly to the most pressing global challenges: inequality, social fragmentation, crime, climate instability, and the erosion of democratic participation.

In a world where wealth has become increasingly concentrated, public goods increasingly commodified, and social cohesion increasingly fragile, the arguments offered by Marx, supplemented by the work of Fraser, Harvey, Piketty, Sen, Wacquant, and other thinkers, reveal that communist ideas are not relics of a bygone era but tools for imagining a more humane and sustainable future.

In an age in which inequality widens, the climate warms, and social bonds fray, communist ideas return like an old melody — half-forgotten, yet strangely familiar. They remind us that another world is possible, not because history guarantees it, but because imagination demands it.

The Gospel and the Guillotine of Indifference

A Chronicle of Convenient Christendom

There are days in Brasil when the morning headlines feel like parables rewritten by the wrong disciples — stories where virtue is loudly proclaimed and quietly abandoned, where the name of Christ is invoked like a campaign slogan, and where the gospel is wielded not as a moral compass but as a cudgel. One might call it hypocrisy, but even that word seems too gentle for the scale of the dissonance.

Some days the sun seems almost accusatory, illuminating everything with an honesty no one asked for. On such a day, I sat with Dilexi te on Love for the Poor open on my lap, as if it were a lantern in the middle of a fog that our politics insist on thickening. Pope Leo XIV writes as one who has walked among the poor, not above them. He speaks of structural sin, of systems that grind the faces of the vulnerable until they forget they were ever children of god.

Brasil’s contemporary right wing—whether dressed in the corporate suits of the União Brasil, the punitive rhetoric of PL, or the nostalgia-soaked moralism of Republicanos — moves through public life like a procession of pharisees convinced they alone possess divine authority. Yet their actions betray them at every turn.

They demand obedience to scripture while ignoring its first lesson: compassion.

They praise the sanctity of life while defending policies that routinely abandon living, breathing human beings.

They speak of family while endorsing economic structures that grind families into precarity.

It is a theatre of selective morality — one in which Jesus is constantly quoted, yet rarely followed.

The Poverty of Mercy

Consider the passionate speeches about protecting the poor delivered by politicians who vote consistently against welfare expansion, against food assistance, against housing programmes, and in favour of regressive tax structures that place the heaviest burdens precisely on those Christ identified as his own. If Christ is the shepherd, the brasilian right often behaves like hired hands who, seeing the wolf of poverty approach, simply shut the door and retreat into gated communities.

The PL’s relentless push for austerity, presented as fiscal responsibility, reads more like an extended footnote to the biblical story of the rich young ruler — except in this version, the ruler not only refuses to give up his wealth but also demands that the poor surrender theirs as well.

The Cult of Vengeance

Christianity teaches forgiveness, mercy, the dignity of every human soul. Yet one finds among the right a fixationv — bordering on obsession — with punitive policing, harsher sentencing, and a fantasy of righteous violence. As if Christ, confronted with the adulterous woman, would have ordered the first stone to be thrown with military precision and broadcast on national television.

The law-and-order rhetoric of parties like Republicanos and figures aligned with the evangelical bloc is not a defence of justice but a performance of power. It sanctifies brutality, canonises the police bullet, and declares entire communities unworthy of redemption. When the children of favelas are treated as collateral damage, and when politicians respond with statistical shrugs, one sees not christianity but its grotesque inversion.

Mammon’s Most Faithful Servants

The gospel could not be clearer: “You cannot serve God and Mammon.”
Yet in the brasilian right, Mammon appears not only served but enthroned.

The alliance between right-wing parties and extractive industries — agribusiness, mining conglomerates, and deforestation giants — would make even the golden calf blush. Environmental destruction is justified with a theological flair: god, they say, “gave us the land to use,” conveniently forgetting that he did not instruct humankind to pillage it to exhaustion.

The ruralista bloc prays loudly on sunday only to vote on monday for everything that accelerates environmental collapse and undermines indigenous survival. They claim stewardship; they practise exploitation.

The Gospel According to the Market

Jesus expelled the money-changers from the temple; the brasilian right invites them back with tax incentives.
The neoliberal creed — repeated like a litany by sectors of Novo, União Brasil, and the corporate wing of the right — declares that the market will heal all wounds. But the market has never healed a wound; it merely calculates its profitability.

And still they insist that privatisation is salvation, deregulation is redemption, and austerity is good news for the poor — though only the poor are ever asked to sacrifice.

If Christ multiplied bread and fish, the modern right atomises it, repackages it through private intermediaries, and sells it back with high interest.

A Christ Retrofitted for Power

Perhaps the most audacious act is the political renovation of Jesus himself.
The carpenter of Nazareth, who walked among the marginalised, is repurposed as a nationalist icon; the pacifist prophet becomes a mascot for gun culture; the agitator against empire is recast as a defender of authoritarian strongmen.

It is a theological manoeuvre so cynical it borders on artistry.

The bolsonarista wing in particular has perfected this tactic: turning faith into branding, liturgy into propaganda, pastors into political technicians. In their hands, christianity becomes less a spiritual tradition and more a marketing franchise — its product line including outrage, fear, and the constant promise of moral superiority.

The Chronicle’s Closing Note

One need not be christian to recognise the tragedy. It is literary, almost Shakespearean: a cast of characters convinced they are protagonists of a divine narrative, failing to notice that they are the antagonists in their own story.

They speak of Christ with patriotic fervour, but when confronted with his actual teachings, they behave like officials inspecting forged documents. This Christ is inconvenient, they seem to say. Let us remodel him.

And so they do.

They craft a Christ who hates precisely the people the historical Jesus embraced.
A Christ who blesses militias, applauds evictions, and nods approvingly at environmental plunder.
A Christ who resembles not the saviour of the gospels but the leaders who invoke his name.

It is not merely hypocrisy.
It is heresy disguised as patriotism.
A chronicle of moral dissonance so loud it drowns out the very Gospel they claim to protect.

And the irony is almost biblical:
in trying to claim Christ for themselves, they have wandered farther from him than they dare admit.

The bible warns that we will know a tree by its fruits.
The fruits of compassion, dignity, and solidarity are more abundant among those who seek to lift the poor, rather than blame them.

Perhaps, one day, under a gentler sun, the two rivers — faith and politics — may finally merge. But only if we acknowledge the distance between Christ’s words and the policies of those who most claim to speak in his name.

The Pedagogy of Becoming: Paulo Freire and the Crisis of Consciousness in Contemporary Brasil

In the present hour of Brasilian education, Paulo Freire’s voice resounds like a distant thunder — familiar, yet increasingly ignored by those who govern the nation’s schools. His vision of conscientização, the awakening of critical consciousness, has never been more necessary, nor more endangered. The new model of secondary education — ostensibly designed to offer “flexibility” and “career readiness” — reveals itself instead as a quiet betrayal of Freire’s emancipatory dream. Under the rhetoric of modernisation lies a pedagogy of resignation, one that trains rather than educates, conditions rather than liberates.

Freire taught that education is never neutral. It either domesticates or humanises; it either reproduces the world as it is or transforms it through dialogue and reflection. The restructured Ensino Médio, with its utilitarian emphasis on “skills”, “employability”, and “efficiency”, signals a shift from formation to function, from thought to task. The student ceases to be a subject of knowledge and becomes a consumer of competencies. It is, in essence, the banking model of education reborn in neoliberal attire.

This quiet transformation parallels Antonio Gramsci’s warning about cultural hegemony: the ruling class need not impose ideology by force if it can shape the curriculum. The promise of “choice” within the new system — allowing students to select “itineraries” of study — conceals an absence of real agency. How can one choose freely when the horizon of possibilities has already been narrowed by economic necessity? As Hannah Arendt once observed, “education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.” Yet the new educational order loves only productivity, not the world.

In this new landscape, philosophy, sociology, and arts — the disciplines that teach students to question, to imagine, to dissent — are increasingly marginalised, framed as luxuries for the few. What remains is a curriculum stripped of doubt, designed to produce compliance in the name of adaptability. Here, Freire’s pedagogy of hope meets its antagonist: a pedagogy of market logic, where dialogue is replaced by metrics and the word “critical” is quietly excised from the vocabulary of learning.

Freire’s insight that “to speak a true word is to transform the world” feels subversive again. In a society fractured by misinformation and social inequality, the cultivation of critical consciousness is not a privilege — it is a form of resistance. The new Ensino Médio threatens to extinguish this resistance at its root, converting schools into training grounds for precarious futures. Students are told they are free to choose, yet they are not free to think deeply about why their choices exist in the first place.

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that we are “condemned to be free” — that freedom carries with it the burden of responsibility and reflection. The contemporary educational system, however, seeks to relieve students of this burden, offering instead the comfort of superficial certainty. It trades the existential struggle for meaning for a checklist of competencies. It replaces Freire’s dialogical encounter with the algorithmic logic of standardised assessment.

And yet, beneath this mechanisation, the human hunger for meaning persists. In classrooms across Brasil, teachers — often underpaid, undervalued, yet profoundly committed — continue to create small revolutions of thought. They invite students to speak, to question, to name the world. These moments of resistance recall Freire’s belief that education is an act of love, and that love, in its truest form, is revolutionary.

The crisis of Brasilian education is therefore not merely pedagogical — it is ontological. It reflects a broader societal fear of genuine thinking, a preference for obedience over awareness. Freire warned that the oppressed internalise the logic of their oppressors; now, perhaps, the students of Brasil are being taught to internalise the logic of the market. Against this tide, the Freirean project remains a radical affirmation of humanity: that to educate is to believe in the capacity of every person to read the world, not merely to navigate it.

If Brasil’s future is to be more than efficient—if it is to be just, conscious, and alive—it must return to the difficult art of dialogue, the courage of reflection, and the dream of a pedagogy that teaches not what to think, but how to think. Only then will Freire’s vision cease to be a memory and become once more a movement.