Breathing You E-Book

Antonio Augusto

• Herausgeber: e-galáxia
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 106

Beschreibung

"Breathing you" is a book of short stories (and poems) of modern love. It describes in a deep and yet simple way encounters, mismatches and challenges couples face nowadays. It is filled with sensitivity, wisdom and humor as well. It will make you laugh, cry and think. The stories in "Breathing you" will touch everybody, because they reflect what happens to everyone who loves, lost love or is in its pursuit.

Leseprobe

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 over me; every glance, every kiss, every touch, every note on the bathroom mirror.

You always saw my true colors, saw what I was feeling, but I always doubted it. You were always the mirror and the light.

But shadows are a part of light, and you made me fearful. It’s hard to admit that I was afraid, but I was, and it was deep. I was afraid that I needed you.

The Department of Health should make you wear a warning: “Causes chemical dependence.” These last six months, I’ve had substantial crises of withdrawal from you.

My greatest obstacle has always been this fear. Here, in this desert of snow, facing my own monsters, they have been fading away like fog does in sunlight. The absence I feel when you’re not with me is greater than fear. I discovered that I would lose you through fear of losing you. Absurd, isn’t it?

You said you would wait for me, with the qualification that you weren’t the type of woman who would live with a shared man. You said you would wait, unless Rodrigo Santoro invited you to dinner. Just to be sure, I had him kidnapped. But he’s doing fine.

I arrive next Friday, eight kilos lighter, bearded, skin dry from the cold, conspicuous wrinkles on my face, but otherwise whole and ready to love you every day for the rest of my life.

All my love,

Bernardo

____________________

Bernardo,

Sometimes I feel like biting your ear. When you told me you were going to spend six months at a base camp in Antarctica, I froze. I admit that rage was my first response, hoping you’d be eaten by a polar bear. But it passed quickly.

Bernardo, you dummy, I always saw you for what you are because I always looked at you closely. You charmed me with your way of speaking, the way you explained complex things in a simple way; your enthusiasm for living, the way you can be funny, and focus on your goals like a child playing a videogame. I’ve always admired your determination and strength. In my eyes, your fear of love never made you weak.

You were born with a damaged GPS and with your “love” button permanently on “off,” which is why I was always losing you whenever you got close and tried to turn on that damned button of yours.

These last six months weren’t easy! I couldn’t get you out of my head through endless nights of insomnia, imagining how you were, what you might be thinking and feeling; I dreamed up a lot of nonsense. I was also afraid, but in the deepest places of my heart, I always believed that you would wake up.

I am very happy. I admit that waiting for your arrival will be the longest week of my life.

Come Bernardo, come now; we’ve already lost too much time. I don’t care if you’re skinny or bearded. You lose a little weight, and then gain it back, but it’s worth it.

I love you as I’ve always loved you.

Elisa

P.S. You may have kidnapped Rodrigo Santoro, but George Clooney called me!

LOVE LETTERS III

Pedro,

November arrived quickly, and being so close to December made me start to reflect. I thought about all those years we spent together, everything we went through, and I remembered how I waited for so long, remembered my dreams and my life and inevitably remembered everything we don’t have together, and how you couldn’t or wouldn’t provide it.

I am a woman, and women dream; we plan, step by step; we write the script and we direct the film. In our particular film, I’m not the leading actress. I appear only in certain scenes. But I want my name in the credits next to yours, in huge letters the same as yours. I’m tired of living in the shadows, in the afternoons, in the intervals, during trips. I can’t stand the shadows anymore. I want the light of day; I want to kiss you in the middle of street, without glancing from side to side, and without you losing your focus.

I’m tired, Pedro, of always trying and needing to convince my friends that someday our time will come, because I don’t even believe it anymore. And when they look at me the way they do, I feel like disappearing and I get enraged at you, and at myself. I’m tired of waiting.

A few days ago I found myself crying when I read this sentence in Facebook: “Love deferred is love denied.” I read it, broke down, and cried like a child. How can I ignore the fact that our love has been deferred for years now?

I don’t want to keep deferring my life. I don’t want just a few minutes. I want all the minutes. Aren’t our own minutes together fabulous? They’re marvelously fabulous, but you can’t imagine the hangover the next day. The better our time together, the more difficult the next day is. I don’t want to be afraid anymore of the next day.

I want Christmas’s together with the family. I want New Year’s Eve, Saturday nights, Sunday afternoons. I want to sleep and wake every day with you. I want the routine of living together that we’ve never had.

I don’t want the feeling anymore of being a stop along the way. I want permanence.

You’re probably already feeling uncomfortable, feeling pressure and thinking that this is just another one of my crises. But it isn’t. By the time you’re reading this letter, I’ll already be living in another place.

I need to break what doesn’t continue. I know you try, but can’t do it. Neither can I.

I want you to be happy. As Lulu Santos sings: “I don’t want you to suffer, but I don’t want you anymore.”

Lígia

Pedro received the letter, read it, cried. He couldn’t respond, and had no argument even if he could.

LOVE LETTERS IV

JoãoPedro,

Dealing with betrayal is to walk a torturous painful path, with no apparent return.

Since everything happened, I’ve suffered a lot. I’ve turned inward, doubt my own values, my beliefs, even my own life.

You know I’ve always believed in the value of ritual. Our own wedding was a beautiful profound celebration, exchanging vows. I’ve always tried to live and keep the commitments I’ve made.