It is a Sunday morning here in Candeal and I am feeling an urge to write. A friendly samba tune floats through the window as I sit on my bed; the sweetness of homemade chocolate cake, made the previous day in the heat of the kitchen, lingers in my mouth.

The day is slow, as days often are— if we let them be.

Slow days are days when I awake to shouts and barks on the street, the early morning chatter of my neighborhood. They are the mornings I spent in Rio Vermelho, drinking Ovo Maltine milkshakes post-wax with my sister, or in Nazaré, painting watercolor designs as the radio hums familiar tunes. They are the afternoons spent wandering throughout the city with a peanut-flavoured popsicle, the hours spent reading on park benches or clean beds, the people who begin conversations in the heat of a Bahian summer.

Slow days look like Paulo, the…