Overwhelmed with a sense of longing and love. Yes, for my closest friends and family who I do not see often, but recently for the people who have played a small part in my life. Who were only in it briefly. Ones that stand out most are perhaps my family that I lived with in Brasil for a month. They didn’t know English, and we didn’t know Portuguese and that made for some heart-felt, talented charades, and by the end of our time there, I could stumble my way through a fluent conversation. 

It’s weird for me to feel this intense longing for people who I will likely never see again, these and others from my past. Memories, though, will make me smile no matter how far we are or how much I’ve changed since then. Memories like the mother, Merces, giving us some of her blue hand-made and hand-painted jewelry on our last night because it matched my eyes, or how Joan, the father, learned the word ‘hot dog’ in English and thought it was hilarious (and used it multiple times over the month), or memories of Saulo, our Brasilian brother, who was funny, even in a different language, or even of the youngest of their children, Emilio, who was kind of a brat…but picked up English faster than I could have imagined. 

I’m glad to have had these memories and these people in my life; them and others like them.