Silent Tears in the Supermarket Aisle

Sometimes, it’s just about sadness, pure, ridiculous sadness

Araci Matos
Araci’s life

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created with canva.com on a very strange day

This life of adulthood is strange, deceitful, and boring. I never knew that one of the stages of life would be unlearning how to feel it.

Step by step, without noticing, we leave friends behind in the past. And with them, the café meetups, the late-night bar gatherings, those concerts of obscure bands we all nod along to, pretending they’re “so cool,” or even the simple freedom of having time to wander around a park with a book in hand, in some faraway city where we once thought life would remain forever.

And all of this is interrupted by the absurdity of work — those endless hours of our lives we trade for money.

It’s strange how, when we’re young, this notion of time lost to work doesn’t weigh on us. How, in our twenties, we believed we had eternity ahead of us. We realize this was the biggest lie ever when we hit our thirties.

Work takes the best of us — I’m becoming more convinced. And from the best parts of us, it steals our good moods, patience, and energy. The energy that we once thought was limitless and renewable. But over time, we realize it’s not and must be spent only on what’s strictly necessary.

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Araci Matos
Araci’s life

Trying to be the Portuguese Annie Ernaux or Elena Ferrante