I went back to Brasília expecting to remember.
I was not prepared for the feeling that the city remembered me.
I was back for maybe the last high school reunion for Escola Americana de Brasilia. EAB - The school had grown up. There was new paint, remodeling, and a polished surface that belonged to another generation of students. But beneath it all, I could still see the old EAB—the concrete bleachers, walls, and floors that seemed to borrow their substance from Brasília itself.
The city of Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer had always spoken in concrete: ambitious, improbable, sometimes austere, yet capable of taking shapes no one had seen before.
I found myself wondering if perhaps we had been made from some of that same material.
We had come from different countries, cultures, races, religions, and families. Brasília was still discovering what it would become, and EAB was a young school gathering students from all over the world while figuring out its own identity.
Were we somehow the missing pieces of both?
There was no internet, no cell phones, no endless stream of entertainment, and no real sports scene. There was little of the conventional city life that might have allowed us to remain strangers.
We had Brasília. We had EAB. And we had one another.
So, we built something.
Concrete gave Brasília both its structure and its visual language. EAB gave us a language of our own.
It wasn’t English or Portuguese.
It was the language of acceptance, friendship, connection, and love.
We learned to speak it not because we were alike, but perhaps because we needed one another. Our differences were not obstacles we first had to overcome. They were simply part of who we were.
There was room for a skinny kid with an Afro and puka shells. There was room for a not-so-confident kid who never had to feel solitary. There was room to be different without always having to explain the difference.
All you needed to be was yourself.
And somehow, that was always enough.
At the dinner dance, I found myself seeing someone across the room, recognizing the smile before I recognized the face, and suddenly forty years collapsed into nothing. There would be an embrace, a name spoken exactly the way I remembered it, and the strange realization that some part of us had simply been waiting to resume the conversation.
It kept happening.
A familiar laugh. A hand on my shoulder. An abraço that seemed to hold all the intervening years inside it. We remembered things about one another that had long since disappeared from our own memories. We introduced spouses and family members, told stories, filled in the missing years, and somehow picked up a conversation that had begun when we were teenagers.
How was that possible?
How could it feel as though we had never left?
We began speaking our old language again almost immediately, without practice or translation. It was there in every embrace, every remembered story, every generous introduction, and every moment when the years between us seemed to disappear.
There we were, familiar in our own skin all over again.
Of course, we had changed. We had followed different paths, built careers, raised families, and experienced joy, disappointment, tragedy, sadness, and even death. We had become people our teenage selves could not possibly have imagined.
But something between us had remained.
We had all gone on to improvise very different lives, but I could still hear something familiar underneath. The original rhythm was still there. Different melodies, perhaps, but somehow the same song.
What had we created together all those years ago?
Was it simply the intensity of being young and far from home? Was it the isolation of Brasília? Was it the experience of attending a small international school where people continually arrived and left? Or had we somehow created a kind of belonging strong enough to survive distance, silence, and time?
I am still not sure.
What I do know is that these people remembered a version of me that few others had known. They remembered me before careers, titles, children, successes, disappointments, and all the other layers adulthood eventually added.
I had not returned because an essential piece of me was missing. I had been whole all along. But through their memories, their affection, and the ease with which we found one another again, they reminded me that the person I had become at EAB had never disappeared.
They did not put me back together.
They helped me recognize the original architecture, just like those good old cement bleachers in the gym once again. They were always there.
The EAB experience had yielded good fruit. I could see it in the warmth, acceptance, and generosity of spirit surrounding me. None of us had become the same kind of person, nor should we have. But we each seemed to carry some variation of the same theme—a willingness to make room for people, to cross boundaries, and to find connection in our differences.
Perhaps that was what EAB gave us.
Not merely a place where we once belonged, but a way of helping other people belong.
Near the end of the trip, I found myself thinking again about the Candangos statue and those two figures that have followed me for so much of my life.
They do not stand alone.
They lean toward one another, each helping the other bear the weight of what they came to build.
For years, I thought of the Candangos primarily as builders—people transplanted from somewhere else who came together to construct a capital in an improbable place. That still feels like part of our story. We were also transplanted. We came from somewhere else, but together we made a life in Brasília and filled a young school with friendship, memory, and love.
But perhaps I had overlooked the most important part of the statue.
The figures are still connected.
After all these years, they are still leaning toward one another.
Maybe that is why the statue has meant so much to me. It is not simply an image of what we built then. It is an image of what somehow remains between us now.
All these years later, we are still standing—not unchanged, but recognizable. We have each carried different burdens and traveled very different roads.
But when we came together again, we remembered the language.
And just like the Candangos, we discovered that we were still leaning toward one another.
I will never forget this experience. It was a Hall of Fame memory that I will cherish forever.
