A town of 12,000 saints

Where time moved slowly, the air smelled like bread and prayer, and I first learned how to want more.

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, as if to remind us to pause, to breathe, to remember where we were.

That bell marked everything: school days, bored afternoons, heartbreaks.

Lagoa Dourada had about 12,000 people when I lived there. But it felt smaller, because no one was ever just themselves. You were always someone’s daughter, someone’s niece, someone’s classmate’s cousin. 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 chains. No malls. No cinemas. No coffee shops where you could disappear into a notebook and watch people you didn’t already know. Just three churches, two schools, one town library. And a small clinic, where you hoped not to run into anyone you knew in the waiting room.

And a bakery near the highway, where I’d go every morning to buy bread: warm, wrapped in soft, greying brown paper. I’d be waiting for the attendant and staring 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 and piano recitals in faraway places. She’d read them first, vetting them to make sure they were “clean enough,” and then hand them 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 could go to, full of familiar faces, sticky tables, and bad napkins. 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 would marvel at the sparkly wings as much as I did.

But while the town gave me structure, I always lived a bit outside its pace.
The girl who believed in signs.
Who spent too much time in the library.
Who stared too long at the horizon.
Most of my friends had more practical dreams.

This is the town that shaped me, sometimes without knowing it.
It made me curious. Restless. Devoted. Awake.
It taught me how to notice things, how to want more, how to stay still and imagine movement.

This is where we begin.
Not at the very beginning of my life, but with the first diary I’ve chosen to open.
The first year I’m ready to revisit.

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

🎵 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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