Pay passion – 08/27/2023 – The Worst of the Week

Adriana writes to me asking if I “pay for passion” easily and says she doesn’t accept “friends who go home deeply involved after a third date”. Curious how here in São Paulo, where we are known to think a lot about money, there is no such expression that combines passion with issuing receipts. The act of paying passion, I still remember well in my 30s, is very carioque.

When I lived in Rio de Janeiro, and saw a guy who looked like Humberto Carrão on every corner, I understood that I could fall in love 40 times a day, during my walks from Leblon to Copacabana.

I confess that my clinical obsession is more the verb “to last”. I speak every week in therapy about my desire for an unshakable, continuous encounter, where I can still flourish for a long time and one day die satiated with stories and meanings. If it got cheesy, I apologize.

But passion, I have the good fortune (and in the eyes of many friends, the insanity) to feel it all the time. At some stages of life, I fall in love with two, three, or four people at the same time. I always leave meetings, birthdays, lunches, interviews, in love with someone. Of course, the durations range from seconds to years, depending on whether I’m just using the other’s back as a projection screen or whether there is in fact an interesting being that can stop standing after a few days. I’m not saying that I live really and carnally even 1/100 of these fantasies, but I wouldn’t know how to put up with the days if it weren’t for my ability to crave other people’s skin.

I fall in love with new friends, I fall in love with the people I work with, I fall in love with two lines of conversation in an outgoing message. And it’s not that hippie talk of loving everything and everyone, plants, animals, I’m talking about wanting to lick the face of human beings. From the heart beating wildly in different parts of the body. A friend says they should make a spray with my libido and sell it at Fornicari (a very expensive sex shop with a very cheap name).

It has already happened to me to go out and cry pitangas about an overwhelming passion with a colleague and, in the middle of crying, realizing myself completely in love with the dear listener who returns ironies and intensities to me as if we were in a tennis game, all this while receiving a intelligent and spicy message from a third party and, sighing, I realize that I could live something hot with a stranger at the next table.

That’s the story I could tell my analyst weekly, concluding, aloud, that deep down, who I really want is him. Am I always like this? No. I spend long periods free from a kind of passionate manic state, but when I am, I enjoy it, even if I’m exhausted.

I understand that Adriana’s question wants to go a little further, and understand if I melt and declaim to people. Yes, I’m not ashamed of being ridiculous and I’m not afraid of chasing guys away with my unreasonable haste.

I remember a young man with a red beard who heard my whispers begging “I would spend my life with you” and he had been at my house for two hours. I had known him for two hours and twenty minutes. He laughed a lot and said “Wow, can you pay for passion that easy?”.

The next day I wrote endless chronicles about his red beard and small hands. I spent two weeks listening to songs and thinking about him. And he laughed a lot in my face. Well, last week he appeared at my book launch. He wanted to introduce the girl he always talked about to the family: “Crazy, she wrote several texts about me”. I didn’t remember his name.

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