Rio Feverdream # 1

Rio de Janeiro, 2min read

“no you can’t go home, you’re with us now” she tells me in a way that leaves no room for discussion, forcing me to abandon my self-care and nervous system regulation-obsessed winter-self and surrender to chaos, community, lack of control.

We are at a bloco, of course we are, maybe the 4th bloco today, I stopped counting. The half naked sparkly sun tanned sweaty carnival crowd is trippelschritting along Flamengo Beach and I keep being pushed off the boardwalk and onto the soft sand of the beach, which is fine if you’re okay with walking along the beach with the much less crowdier beach crowd, instead of the main crowd, but I don’t think I want that.

I want to be part of the annoyingly slow-moving dense mass of bodies, where intensity is most intense, chaos is most chaotic and life is lifing the mostest. So whenever I fall off the boardwalk I get back onto it and squeeze myself back into the herd, which would be an acceptable routine I guess if herds - groups of people - were my thing, but they actually are not. Like not at all. But people is where life is, and life is my thing. Above anything. Sometimes you have to self-abandon for pleasure. Stretch your comfort zone. Be the antidote to yourself.

The sun is throwing herself at me like an over-eager anxiously attached lover; smothering, inescapable. No shade. No refuge. I’m too vain to wear that hat I brought to protect me from sunstroke, so instead I let heat freely assault me, while I throw my loose curls into faces of people who throw their loose curls into my face, and in chaotic pulsating unison we move our bodies along the ocean to the sounds of the samba drums, that are leading this hungry amoebic animal that is all of us towards - who knows - probably another bloco.

My body is shaking from overstimulation, screaming for peace and quiet and I scream back: trust me body, we got this! And we do. And we keep going.