A town of 12,000 saints

Where the air smelled like bread and prayer, and a girl was already dreaming of somewhere else.

There was a bell that rang every hour in Lagoa Dourada.

It came from the main church at the top of the hill, the one that loomed over the town like a stern but loving grandmother. Every hour, on the dot, the bell rang, and at six o’clock, it played Ave Maria.

That bell marked time for all of us. School days, bored afternoons, the small heartbreaks that come with growing up somewhere everyone’s watching.

Lagoa Dourada had about 12,000 people when I lived there, but it felt smaller than that. No one was ever just themselves: you were somebody’s daughter, or somebody’s cousin’s classmate, and everyone already knew which. Even strangers came with footnotes: “He married Dona Maria’s granddaughter,” or “She’s from the farm next to João’s land.”

There were no chain stores or malls in town, nothing like a movie theater to go sit in after class. No coffee shop, either, where you could disappear into a notebook and watch people you didn’t already know.

There were a couple of schools and a small library, and a clinic where you hoped not to run into anyone you knew while waiting.

And a bakery near the highway, where I’d go every morning to buy bread, warm and wrapped in brown paper. I’d wait for the attendant and stare outside, watching the buses pass, full of people I’d never meet, going places I couldn’t yet imagine. I used to wonder what their lives were like, what language they were speaking, if they knew how lucky they were to be going somewhere else.

I’d been dreaming of leaving since I was small.

Part of it was the books. My mom was an avid reader of Barbara Cartland romances: tales of castles and dukes, piano recitals in places I’d never heard of. She read them first, made sure they were “clean enough,” and only then passed them down to me. She even clipped pictures of castles from magazines and tucked them in between pages.

I grew up surrounded by those images: moats and stone towers and women named Beatrice. That world felt impossibly far, but I wanted it. I didn’t know how or when, but I knew I’d get there.

Still, for a long time, this town was my world. I worked my first job scooping ice cream. I spent long evenings at Aquarius, the one bar we were allowed in, where the tables were sticky and everyone at them was someone you already knew. I studied obsessively, tried to avoid math, and filled my notebooks with poems and horoscopes no one asked for. I made greeting cards on the family computer and decorated them with clipart angels, eager to give them to my friends and hoping they’d marvel at the sparkly wings as much as I did.

The town gave me structure, but I still lived a bit outside its pace: the girl who believed in signs and spent too many afternoons at the library window, staring out and losing track of time. Most of my friends had more practical dreams.

This is the town that built who I am, sometimes without meaning to. It made me restless long before I had anywhere to go, and it taught me how to stay in one place and still imagine leaving it.

This is where we begin. Not the very start of my life, but the first diary I was ready to open again.

One town. One bell. And a girl who dreamed in English long before she could speak it.

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🎵 Listen to the song that grew from these memories: In the Corners

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✶ This essay is part of From the Beginning, a personal series built from my diaries—one memory at a time. You’re reading 1998. Each piece revisits the girl I was, the world I came from, and the details I didn’t know I was already saving.

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