The other day, I came across a photo of myself receiving a preschool diploma, back in 1986. I found myself staring at it longer than I expected, trying to imagine what kind of world could fit inside that boy. There’s a quiet strangeness in recognizing an image and yet not fully recognizing the story that holds it together. It’s me, and yet it isn’t anymore. Or maybe it never was in quite the way I now imagine.
I have very few memories of that day. What came back was a vague image of a girl from my class, someone I may have held a quiet affection for. I don’t know her name, I don’t know where she went, I only know that at some point she was no longer there. It’s curious how certain presences don’t remain as memories, but as a kind of absence that never quite resolves.
Meanwhile, the world was unfolding on a different scale. Halley’s Comet crossed the sky, carrying with it expectations that each person named in their own way. A reactor exploded in Chernobyl, a spacecraft broke apart in the sky before the eyes of those who believed in progress, and here in Brazil, the country tried to reorganize time itself through the Cruzado Plan, as if it were possible to negotiate with the very rhythm of things. There was a kind of fever in the world, a restlessness I didn’t perceive, sheltered by a kind of ignorance that wasn’t a lack, but a form of wholeness.
In my world, something else was taking shape. Looking back now, school feels less like a place of instruction and more like a territory of encounters. Teachers who arrived and, without warning, left again, as if life were always calling them elsewhere. I remember one teacher in particular, full of presence, the kind who fills a room with her voice, her gestures, her whole body. I never saw her again. Sometimes I think about trying to find her—Nilza, that’s the name that remained—but maybe what moves me isn’t finding her, but holding on to the question.
I also remember a math teacher, strict, precise, the kind who didn’t make things easy. Today, he might be reframed, adjusted, corrected. But there was something in him I only understand now: a quiet attention to genuine curiosity, to the student who leaned into doubt instead of avoiding it. It wasn’t warmth in the most comfortable sense, but it was a form of respect.
These experiences didn’t arrive all at once. They built up quietly, almost without my noticing. In second grade, I had a teacher I was very fond of. When I found out she was leaving, I felt something I couldn’t name at the time, something I now recognize as a kind of dislocation, as if something that felt steady had suddenly given way. It wasn’t just her absence, but the realization that what seems stable can, without warning, come undone. Some lessons don’t come from explanations, but from interruptions.
And in the middle of it all, there was also a kind of lightness that slipped through. I remember a play we put on in fourth grade. I was playing the doctor, and at one point I accidentally let my classmate’s head drop onto the wooden floor. The sound was loud, the laughter immediate. It’s a small memory, but a stubborn one, as if time, in erasing so much else, decided to keep what was never meant to last.
Looking back at that photo, I began to see that life isn’t shaped by the major events we learn to name, but by these small, everyday passages. What stays with us isn’t just what remains, but also what slips away, what shifts, what never quite finds its place. Memory isn’t an archive, it’s something that keeps reworking itself. It doesn’t hold on to what was, but to what, somehow, still lingers.
Now, so many years later, I sometimes find myself wondering where those teachers might be. How many classes they moved through, how many names passed through them until they blurred together. Some may have retired, others may no longer be here. A few I still glimpse from afar through social media, distant presences that confirm they went on. Others, I know nothing about at all. And yet something remains, a kind of quiet recognition: they didn’t just pass on knowledge, they shared time, attention, a way of being that, in some way, still moves through me.
Looking at that photograph again, something became clear: that diploma said very little about what was ahead. It was a light piece of paper, almost not enough. And yet, in a way, it may have said what mattered most, without my knowing it at the time: that learning isn’t about accumulating, but about moving through. That growing up means learning to live with what falls apart while we’re still trying to make sense of it.
Forty years later, the world moves at a different pace, in a different scale, almost in a different language. Some things have faded; others have come back in new forms. And I find myself, in some quiet way, still trying to recognize in who I used to be what continues to move me.
I look at the photo again and get the sense that it’s looking back at me, as if it knows something I haven’t quite grasped yet. Maybe growing up is this, learning to live in the distance between who we were and who we think we’ve become, never quite able to close that gap. And then a question surfaces, one that doesn’t fully settle: when I look at that boy, am I trying to remember who I was, or to understand who, in the end, I never stopped being?
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