Getting Through

by Débora Cavalcanti (Brazil)

A leap into the unknown Brazil

I was sitting on a chair right in front of the exit gate. Where should I go now? I was only allowed to get to the apartment at 1:00pm, and it was 9:30am still. I was a broken-hearted girl with all of these suitcases around me. Breathing in and breathing out as my therapist would tell me to do. Don’t look lost, pretend you already know this place and have a family there. Just be one of them. If being a woman is not easy these days, you can nearly imagine how hard can it be being a tourist woman in a city you’ve never been before. Took me some time to stop staring at the people arriving and leaving the airport. It was a sunny day though my soul was flooded in rain. My first trip alone. I went to Curitiba for my birthday. Suddenly, turning 22 years old looked like something good. I had just finished a long-term relationship with someone I really cared about. Proving to myself that I was going to be fine was a big challenge, though the acting classes helped me to pretend it was my character's feelings, not mine. It was just a messy phase. As soon as I left the airport, I went right straight to the food market. A not very good ideia I must say. All of my bags in a huge market that was overcrowded. Excellent, Débora! You're doing great so far. Irony was all over me and I still needed to get to the apartment which, by the way, a person was living. I had never tried to use airbnb until that day, so I was a little bit scared to stay in a place living with a person I knew nothing about. As a assumed addicted to detective novels person, you must imagine that I was worried about every teeny tiny detail it could possibly went wrong. To not manage to go back home was the best of them. Curitiba was not occasionaly chosen. It's a very cold city which, at that time, felt like the frosty world I was trying to survive into: new, unknown and a journey I had to do it alone.