Never Stop Walking_A Memoir of Finding Home Across the World by Christina Rickardsson

Author:Christina Rickardsson [Rickardsson, Christina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503900967
Goodreads: 36604956
Publisher: AmazonCrossing
Published: 2018-05-31T23:00:00+00:00

With Thirty Boxes of Chocolates in My Arms

2015

Rivia and I walk out of the hotel and get into the car that’s going to take us to the orphanage. If I’d been sitting in this car ten or fifteen years earlier, there’d have been quite a bit of rage left in me. Now I don’t feel it; I haven’t felt it for a very long time. We sit in the car, knowing that the trip will take about an hour, depending on traffic. With twenty-two million people living in the greater São Paulo area, you can always expect heavy traffic. We’ve asked the driver to stop at a candy store close to the orphanage. I am not planning to show up empty-handed. Back home in Sweden, I wavered for a long time about what to give the kids at the orphanage. In the end, I decided to give them each a box of chocolates. I settled on that after thinking about what had made me happy in the orphanage. I will never forget the box of Bon O Bon brand chocolates Mamãe brought me when she came to visit. I was so happy! I know that a box of chocolates won’t change the children’s lives or their futures, but maybe they will feel the same joy in the moment that I did as a child.

I look out the car window at the gigantic highway we’re on. A bus squeezes by, going much too fast. I definitely prefer the traffic in Sweden, even if I personally drive like I live in São Paulo. We’ve left the part of the city with the skyscrapers and the big galleries, and are now greeted by smaller buildings, little shops, and big wooden telephone poles with a crazy number of electrical wires, a design that looks extremely dangerous. We exit the big highway and drive on smaller streets. People are strolling along the streets in their flip-flops, and we drive past a coconut stand where someone is selling coconut water. Someone else is selling whole ears of corn on the cob, and everything feels familiar to me. It’s hard to describe, but it’s like I know this world, and yet at the same time it feels so foreign.

The driver stops the car outside a shop. We climb out and go into the shop to look for my Bon O Bon candies. I walk past several shelves, and then I see them, the yellow boxes of chocolates. They look almost exactly like I remember them. I show Rivia that I’ve found them, pick up one of the boxes, and look at it. It feels smaller as I hold it now than it did twenty-four years ago. I smile and feel my eyes well up; it’s ridiculous to cry because I’m holding a box of chocolates, but that’s what I do. Eagerly, I start loading my arms full of boxes. We realize that I’m not going to be able to carry all the boxes, so Rivia approaches one of the employees to ask if we can get a big cardboard box to put them in.

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