The City Was a Woman Too

I hold two passports – two promises of movement that rarely tell the same story.
One opens borders easily, the other invites suspicion.
Together, they mirror the split within me: privilege and precarity at once.
I’ve walked streets in places considered dangerous and felt at peace,
and I’ve walked home through the quiet of Stockholm –
the city so often praised for its safety –
and felt the sharp pulse of fear trace my spine.
Safety, I’ve learned, is not always where the world says it should be.
It’s where the body decides it can exhale.

There’s a quiet rebellion in a woman who moves freely.
Every journey begins with gratitude, and a few questions.
Gratitude for being able to cross borders, to choose when and where to go.
A larger-than-life question of what it means to move through a world, a world that was built by men, for men.
A world still learning how to make space for us –
for our fear, our brilliance, and our contradictions.

São Paulo,
you taught me how to shine in fear.
To walk brightly with just the right amount of sparkle and shine.
To keep my soul close enough so no one could grab it and run faster than light.
You unfold in fragments: neon, concrete, tenderness, and chaos.

Oh, the chaos.

You are beauty,
a warning, an affirmation of what life can be,
as magical as the wildest of dreams,
all in the same warm breath.
You are a woman too,
a bold and colorful one,
aching to be held and understood.
People are scared of you, they compare you to your older sister, Rio.
But your beauty is more complicated than hers,
it demands attention, presence, and patience.

Oh, the patience.

You show yourself slowly, layer by layer,
a secret I wasn’t sure I was meant to know.
Having learned bits of it, all I want is more.
More of you, more of your world.

Being a woman – especially a woman of color –
changed the way we met.
Suddenly, I melted into your rhythm.
Suddenly, you and I were the same.
For those of us who hold the right passports,
movement is easy, unquestioned.
But for me, it comes with explanations.
My face, my accent, my passport –
they never seem to tell the same story.

My whole life, people have asked if I’m from you.
And now that I walk your streets,
I think, perhaps in another life, I was.
In this one, I am a woman who gets to travel,
to taste the world, to witness its contradictions.
But even that privilege has its limits, because this freedom still belongs to a certain world,
a world that was never fully designed for us.

Oh, but we are reshaping it – one day at a time.

Traveling as a woman means learning to hold your head high when needed,
and low when required,
to breathe when expected,
to scream only when it’s safe enough.
To cry when your body allows it,
to laugh on time.
To be a woman is to be everything and nothing –
at once.

And as I leave you, São Paulo,
I carry the questions you asked me.
How do we walk through fear and still stay open?
How do we belong in places that don’t expect us?

You remind me that safety is never guaranteed,
but beauty still insists on being seen.
That even when the world was for men,
and built by men,
we find our ways – through light, through noise,
through each other.

Because I know I walk on the paths that women before me carved open with courage.
And I think of the women here, in your crowded streets,
and everywhere else in the world –
who are not granted the freedom I hold in my hands.
Your city, like so many others, demands that women learn to play the game or disappear.
But I hope, in my small way,
to help change that –
to keep the door open a little longer,
for those who will come after.