It is literature in the veins, man!

Love is gone, but literature remains

There is no heartbreak a delightful book cannot turn into an underlined sentence. The first time I fell in love was by mistake. I thought it was love, but it was just loneliness with a Fernando Pessoa reading playing in the background. It happens. When she left (they always do), I did what every sensitive, emotionally tangled young man does: I locked myself away with a book and a glass of wine. The book was The Sorrows of Young Werther. The wine was cheap. I cried in silence. Not for the ending, but because Goethe was right.

Literature always arrives after the chaos. When love has already turned into memory or resentment, it shows up like that friend who does not judge, just hands you a tissue and quotes Simone de Beauvoir. How many loves were written out of anger? How many novels were born from absence? Michel Proust revived an entire century trying to find the taste of a lost love in a madeleine.

Clarice Lispector wrote by loving what she could not understand. And Carlos Drummond de Andrade used to say that love is the cousin of Lady Death and both are mischievous children. Sometimes we only love so we can write about it later.

That, at the core of affection, there is an aesthetic urgency, a secret desire to turn abandonment into style, silence into a beautiful sentence, pain into a memory that can be told. As if what does not become text keeps haunting us.

Literature does not console. It shares. It says: “Are you suffering? Me too. But look how beautiful it looks on paper.” Maybe that is why, when love dies, we write. Because in the end, whoever survives passion still must survive memory.

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