A friend of mine once told me that it is way harder to write about something while we are living and feeling it. When it comes to academic research, he is definitely right. Concerning poetry, I ain’t entirely sure. Don’t the passionate poets write about their loved ones better while immersed in passion? I wouldn’t…
Author: marianafil
Story-lover, research in the making and huge fan of chocolate biscuits.
Regent’s Park
I don’t know exactly when was the first time I set foot there, but I remember just how it happened. It was a lazy winter afternoon when, after finishing my studies, I decided to take a nap. A while later, when my alarm rang, I looked at my messages, and Elis had sent one “Did…
The Sunny Room
It is ironic, to say the least, that I started to write this when it’s windy and grey outside. But perhaps it can be explained by that saying about how we value things mostly when they aren’t here. Well, this is also the beginning of my story with this room. Our flat is shared between…
The Imperial War Museum
One day I must definitely take this theme to therapy: why am I so obsessed with war movies? I have no idea when it started or which was the first movie that deeply marked me. But one of them is definitely “La Vita è Bella”, the Italian classic about a father who tries to show…
Newman House
Being a “stranger” is, as you may know already, something that I often give some thought to. Although Camus helped me a lot understanding that it is not that bad – since we are all stranger after all – something else has had an incomparable impact on my feelings of non-belonging. I was raised in…
West Hampstead
When I first stepped off the Overground, it felt like a different city. Not just because it had old Victorian houses mixed with modern ones in the same street. But because all the people walking by painted a really different picture from Kentish Town, the calm neighbourhood I had been calling home for the last…
Toulouse
Besides any political belief, football team or musical taste, all Brazilians can agree in at least one thing: we own the most beautiful word of all languages – and it has no translation. Saudade. Foreigner Bossa Nova fans might try to translate it as “the happy sadness of missing something”. The Romantics of the 19th…
Budapest
It had never occurred to me before. As a child, my parents and English teachers would always stress the importance of learning the Shakespeare language saying it would “open all the doors to you”. Not the ones in Budapest, though. It was in my first day in the city that I actually learned the meaning…
About me
Be yourself; everyone else is already taken — Oscar Wilde.
Postcards From The Other Side 