Batman, Banksy and Goodbyes in São Paulo

The first night is the hardest, especially when I’m standing alone where minutes ago Mark was watching TV and where Feng was checking his emails.

The guys only joined me for a couple of weeks. Picking them up at the airport in Rio de Janeiro is now somewhere on my list of top life moments. The three of us packing and parting ways feel oddly familiar and unbearably sad.

I cried more in Rio thinking about it than in São Paulo, mostly because we did a great job pretending it wasn’t happening again.

We spent our last full day together exploring Batman’s Alley and the neighbourhoods around. We also had a mission—Mark had vague memories of the “best playground ever” and I was pretty sure he was thinking of a posh mall where we ended up in December 2020. We found the mall but the temporary playground was long gone. We went to a small Banksy exhibition instead, which was pretty cool. The theme of the day had been murals, anyway.

As usual, Feng and Mark’s Air Canada was scheduled for 9 p.m. so we still managed to enjoy half a day together until the final packing. We walked to Liberdade and I had my usual fresh lemon juice while the guys had a meal at Sukiya. There was a bloco on Rua Augusta but as far as I’m concerned, Carnival ended in Rio de Janeiro—I’m done with glitter for a while.

I went downstairs with them. I put them in the taxi. I’m crying again thinking of the last hug in the street.

It’s much easier when we stick together or leave on the same day but Air Canada has been so unreliable and travel has been so weird in the past few years that it’s safer if I stay an extra night in São Paulo. Case in point, Air Canada sent an email the night before saying the flight was cancelled, then an hour later another email informed Feng it wasn’t cancelled actually.

I went through the night not sleeping much, trying to avoid looking at the small things Feng and Mark had left behind, from water bottles to a loose sparkly glitter.

At this stage, you may be wondering why I didn’t just fly back to Canada with them—the answer is simple, I’m miserable in Canada. It hasn’t always been this way. I did love it for over a decade. But now, it’s… complicated. It is for many people. I’ve seen many immigrants who had been in Canada for decades leaving the country in the past few years.

I still have some travelling to do.

I’m waiting for yet another flight.