Dream seed

by Jessica Buraslan (Brazil)

A leap into the unknown Japan

I’ve dreamt about going to Japan since I was thirteen. I planted my dream on a soil of teenage discomfort and watered it with foreign comics and novelty fashion. Shallow, but true nonetheless. My mom had the same dream for longer. But hers was created by the sense of independence and self-accomplishment that a life of marriage and motherhood can sometimes take away from you. It became something ethereal, almost unachievable, as most dreams do. “One day we’ll go”, and that was that. As time passes, one grows up to understand that not everyone will have a grand life. Sometimes you just have an average job, earn an average income and might have not so average relationships. But everyone craves, one way or another, to have a different life. By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I had a stable job that I did not like and had stayed home to care for my mother, as Latina daughters often do. She had become a grandmother to my siblings, reduced to holiday gifts and Sunday visits, no longer a captive of motherhood, but too comfortable to take a leap. “Mom, I’m going to study in Portugal”, I said one day. Lured by the easy exams and the chance to live in Europe, I applied. My mother was over the moon. She too had grown up in a country that believed that anything foreign was better. She wanted out. It took me ten days to think it through and give up on it. I had been cursed by anxiety. I made an impulsive decision and had told her. I’d come to realise I did not want to move my life overseas. Yes, I wanted change, but not that kind. A month later I was accepted, but I told her I was not. She felt it bad. It felt like she had failed it, not me. I had crushed her dream of living abroad, given her hope for change, and then crushed it with my words. One night, weeks later, sitting in our living room, I told her “Let’s go to Japan”. And that was that. For the next nine months, we took care of this trip as if it was our baby. We selected the best time to go, what we would like to see, to eat. Every bad news on the television, every day at work, every stoical Sunday visit, was compensated by at least having Japan. It was a warm November when we arrived, but we had our coats on anyway. Growing up in a tropical country, just the idea of autumn was enough to make us feel cold. Later, going up the hill, climbing endless stairs behind tourists comically dressed in cheap kimonos, eating every sweet and drinking every different flavour of soda we came across, we made our way to the Kiyomizudera. Among the orange coloured towers, the red roofs and the statue of dragons, I could laugh out loud with my mother. The smiles that were so hard to come by in our daily lives would light up our faces. That dream from way, way back had finally bloomed. I had crushed one of her life goals, but this one I was able to make a reality.