Little paris bookshop

To think on places we've been and loved can mean much more that one might think.

I was a stranger to Nina George's work until on my twenty fifth birthday I browsed through the books at a museum's book shop in downtown Rio de Janeiro while my boyfriend sneakingly bought The Paris Little Book Shop for me without my knowledge. We had been together for two years and he had learned that I didn't care about presents, only that I got them, and books were always guaranteed to make me smile the widest. I remember I didn't think much of the cover, I thought of at least two other pictures from Paris and all of its many river banks that would had been a better choice to portray the story inside, but little did I know, this book would set the tone for most of my months after that, and how that petty thought reflected all that I had been feeling inside without realizing it.

I had been working nights managing construction sites for moths, which I did from time to time. It was the first of many moments I would have about how my career as an Architect was not what I wanted to be doing for the rest of my life. But most importantly, being disconnected from day time, strolls through the abundant trees of Leblon, beers in Copacabana in a summer afternoon and roaming through the alleys of downtown Rio looking for small cafés and bookstores built in century old buildings were out of the question. And I found myself revisiting, during those endless night shifts, all the familiar places I had ever been to to keep me from sleeping or having bad vibes while surrounded by construction men who sweat. A lot.

"I realized that I needed therapy to deal with my escapism. Joke."

It started small. In my head I roamed through the streets of Rio, then my hometown, Sao Paulo, making small plans to revisit places I had only been once or twice. And, without realizing it, I started going back further, to my travels, remembering the smells, the tastes and the general feeling of the cities I had loved the most. It got me through the job, but it lingered on.

My birthday came a month after the work had finished. And on the first gripping lines of Nina George's novel I was transported to Paris. The story is delightful but the connection I have with this book is that for the first time in my life I realized that I needed therapy to deal with my escapism.

Joke.

No, I realized that I have deep connections with places that move me. And I'm not talking about pure nostalgia or wishing to be anywhere but at out jobs, but after some time without any stimuli from these places that I had been and that I became emotionally attached to, I feel down, so blue in a way that it affects my day to day and most importantly, my creativity. No, this is not sabotage, I'm not saying I have to go to Paris to be able to endure my life (although I would love to able to do that), but without visual our tactile connection to these places I, a person driven by creating and inventing things daily, am left with no brain juice. That's the term I came up with after my brilliant realization with Little Paris Bookshop.

I had been stifled in a building with no walls for months, I had been carrying meaningless conversations with the workers about their day and what job they would get next, I was left to look at shopping windows for a whole evening (my work was inside shopping malls), and no matter how brilliant a Chanel collection is, looking at it daily does nothing for my brain. But when it finally ended and I finally took my day strolls by the bay and sat at the café I loved, visited that museum and the De Stijl art movement exhibit, I felt my engines starting, sluggishly, but starting.

While I read Nina's story I travelled through all the hundreds of pictures I had taken from the winter and summer I had spent in Paris, going one by one and trying to think if the places she had written about were the places I had so randomly photographed (I tend to point my camera at every single thing I can wherever I go, but I can rarely name the actual place that's in the picture. Ask me to get back to it once I'm there again, sure! But no names...). The book and those pictures transported me back and it wasn't a week before I put pen to paper again, starting a new story about a couple who meet in a bar that in my story has no name, but was actually inspired by The Chateau D'eau, a nice little bar on the 10th.

What I mean with all that I'm saying is, it took me twenty-five birthdays to realize that we all harbour creativity within us, but inspiration doesn't come from out of nowhere. It needs to be fed by stories, music, art, Architecture, beautiful street lights.

"I remember writing on my Facebook status one depressing day "Creativity doesn't survive the Red Line". "

I remembered living in Sao Paulo in my early twenties and having moved out of my mother's home in a very nice neighborhood. I was working downtown and my apartment was in the suburbs and to travel that distance I had to ride the red line of the subway, or how I called it, the ugly line. It ran above the ground but it really shouldn't, it wasn't doing anyone who had to ride it any favors. It passed through abandoned old industrial neighborhoods and then side by side to one of Sao Paulos largest highways, so the only thing to see for miles were cars, pavement and gray old decrepit buildings. Don't get me wrong, in a good day decrepit buildings can be highly inspiring, but not every day. Not when you're working on a love story, trying to create it out of thin air (I was single and broke at the time). So I remember writing on my Facebook status one depressing day "Creativity doesn't survive the Red Line". I meant it then but it would be years until I could fully grasp my my words meant, even to myself.

If only past me knew what current me does. Don't let your life become one, enormous red line. I was broke but there were still plenty of places where I could get my brain juices going if I just left the house and went looking for them. Explore. I know I live in Rio but that has not always been the case. Leave your home, find your inspiration in the mundane, you don't need a ticket to Paris to find it. But if you think nothing else is working, pause for a moment, Instagram will survive without you for a few days, and read Nina George just for the heck of it. I promise you, something will come.