About 3 months ago I was going downtown by bus. During the "trip" I tried to sleep, but couldn't, so I started to think about everything, and remembered a text of Martha Medeiros, my idol LOL. This text was about the poetry hidden inside our ordinary days, and I began to see the poetry behind those cars, the view and I was even imagining the poetry in Campo de Sant'Ana and in the magnificence of Palácio Duque de Caxias under the sunlight filtered by the clouds of that grey day.
Close to the port, a guy stood up and walked to the front of the bus, after the turnstile, waiting for the arrival at the bustop. Suddenly,as Vinícius de Moraes said:"De repente, não mais que de repente", a man walked from the back of the bus, carring a gun and told the guy not to make a move and checked inside the guys backpack. There was nothing there and the man with the gun returned to his seat. Everyone was shocked!
The guy of the backpack started complaining, said he's just a worker and so on... A few seconds later the guy of the gun stood up once again, and to my despair, he checked the bag of the guy who was sitting in front of me.
My heart was beating sooooo fast...I had to control myself and manage the amount of adrenalin that was thrown in my blood stream.
After that, everyone standing up looked like him with his gun again.
When it was 'over', I tried to see the poetry behind the everyday scenery, but every now and then the image of the gun would flash and kill the poem. Besides the fact that I mentioned that everyone seemed like him.
Only after had he left the bus everyone could breath again. A woman said he told her he was a cop, but he haven't shown an ID to anyone.
Where he was coming from, where he was going to, his name, age, true occupation, all of them I ignore, the only thing I know is that that stranger changed my day and my poetry of that day. I never doubted how short life can be, but that stranger, that tranformed my poems, reinforced that idea...
And it happens more often than we think, strangers are always changing our lives and behaviour: a book you read, an interview you watch, a lecture...You don't know those people, maybe you'll never know them, but at a moment they said or did something that made you say to yourself:"Why haven't i thought about it before??" or "I should do this!".
For the good or the bad, the strangers are there...We just need to reckon what we can allow them to change and what is better to preserve^^
