Some Dreams Arrive Before We Are Ready

When I was ten years old, I heard a Ricky Martin song that made me obsessed with a place I had never seen.

I was one of those kids who felt music physically. A song could change the temperature of a room for me. It could make an ordinary afternoon feel like something was about to happen.

Then I heard "Livin’ la Vida Loca."

There was a part about Rio de Janeiro, dancing in the rain, and I became completely fixated on it.

I ran to my mom and asked her where Rio was.

She found it on a map and showed me. I remember putting my finger on that tiny spot in Brazil and staring at it.

One day, I thought, "I’m going to dance at Carnival in Rio de Janeiro."

Then I went back to being ten.

I forgot about it.

Thirteen years later, I was 23. I had just finished school and gotten my esthetician license. I was bartending while figuring out my next move. My plan was Los Angeles. I wanted to become a special effects makeup artist and work in Hollywood.

LA was supposed to be the beginning of my real life.

Then one night at the bar, a man asked me out.

He was Brazilian.

From Rio de Janeiro.

The childhood memory didn't come rushing back. There was no sign from the universe, no dramatic moment where I connected the dots.

I didn't even think about the song.

We dated for a few months. And somehow, within six months of meeting him, I was emptying my apartment.

I left half my belongings beside the dumpster.

I left my job. My friends. My family. My plans for Los Angeles. Everything I had spent years believing I was supposed to do.

I got on a plane to Brazil.

Even now, I have trouble explaining why.

It wasn't entirely love. There was something else pulling me there. Something almost irrational. My body seemed to make the decision before my brain had time to argue with it.

I landed in São Paulo, and we drove seven hours to Rio.

I had never really traveled before. Now I had moved to another country.

And strangely, I wasn't terrified.

I felt like a little girl.

Everything was unfamiliar—the language, the streets, the food, the people—but instead of making me feel small, it made the world feel enormous.

For the first time in a long time, I was proud of myself.

Then February came.

Carnival.

The city changed.

Music seemed to come from everywhere. Streets closed. People poured outside. There were parties on the beaches and dancing in places that normally belonged to traffic. Rio felt like it had decided sleep was unnecessary.

One day, we were out near the beach with everyone else.

At some point, I wandered away from the group.

I don't remember why.

I just remember suddenly being alone in the middle of thousands of people.

Then it started raining.

Not cold rain. Warm summer rain.

I stopped on the boulevard and looked up.

My hair was soaked. My clothes stuck to me. Music was playing somewhere nearby, and people around me kept dancing as though the rain were part of the celebration.

So I started dancing too.

And that's when I remembered.

The map.

My mother's hand showing me Brazil.

My ten-year-old finger pressed against Rio de Janeiro.

The song.

That little girl making a promise to herself that she had absolutely no idea how to keep.

I was standing inside it.

Thirteen years later, on a boulevard in Rio de Janeiro during Carnival, I was dancing in the rain.

I started crying.

Nobody noticed because the rain hid it.

For a few seconds, I felt something I have never been able to properly explain. It wasn't about the man I had followed there. It wasn't about Brazil. It wasn't even really about the song.

It was about me.

Somewhere along the way, without planning it, I had walked directly into a childhood dream.

And instead of making me feel lucky, it made me feel powerful.

Like maybe there were things inside us that knew where we were going long before we did.

The part that hurts is what happened afterward.

I didn't stay inside that feeling.

Slowly, I became afraid.

While I was living in Brazil, I kept thinking about the life I wasn't living in America.

What was happening without me?

Was I falling behind?

Had I ruined my career?

Should I have gone to Los Angeles?

Was everyone else moving forward while I was standing still?

I became so obsessed with the future I thought I was losing that I stopped seeing the life directly in front of me.

I was even offered an opportunity to audition for a modeling contract in Brazil.

I didn't go.

I convinced myself it wouldn't help me back in America.

That decision still bothers me.

Not because I think I would have become some famous model. Maybe nothing would have happened.

I regret it because "I didn't even let life answer the question."

I answered it for myself with fear.

Looking back, I wish I had given Brazil one full year.

One year without worrying about Los Angeles.

One year learning Portuguese properly. Making friends. Understanding the culture. Taking ridiculous opportunities simply because they appeared. Seeing where that strange childhood promise might lead if I stopped trying to control the ending.

I spent so much time worrying that my life was happening somewhere else.

I didn't understand that my life was already happening.

I was standing in it.

Barefoot in the warm rain.

Dancing on a boulevard in Rio de Janeiro.

Exactly where the little girl with her finger on the map said she would be.