“Laura, we met at So Shine at Carnaval but I lost track of you. Carlos”.
The text, written in neon green stripes, colored the center of Belo Horizonte on Ash Wednesday. Underneath the carnival appeal was an email address that mixed the only information available about that encounter: [email protected], the sum of the man’s name, the name of the woman this man met at Carnival, and the name of the block where the two collided.
The search for this man in love went viral. Carlos’ tracks generated so much curiosity in the state that they ended up on thousands of profiles on the internet and in the headlines of local newspapers:
“Passionate reveler uses banner to find woman he met in the block So Shine”
“Laura, where are you? Reveler is looking for woman he met in Carnival block”
“Reveler hangs banner to look for crush he met at So Shine!”
Even so, his great effort did not reach Laura. At least not yet.
It all started in February. In 2023, it was necessary to pursue the damage of the years taken by the pandemic. And the Carnival in Belo Horizonte was not bad: it officially started on the 4th of February and ended on the 26th, with 5 million revelers confirmed in the capital of Minas Gerais.
And Carlos was just one of them. A lively middle-aged reveler, he decided to go alone to the block So Brilha, which was born in the center of the city, close to the low red light district.
“I made an appointment with some friends, I missed everyone, because the thing gets so big that you don’t have a cell phone signal there”, says Carlos, in the first interview of his life. Then, among a million and a half people, he saw one woman. And, in his words, he thought “that’s her”
“I felt something for a girl, it’s her, you know? It’s her, like, I’m going to her, I’m going to talk to her, I’m going to try to invest in her. I felt that thing. I said, ‘nuh’, it’s really her.”
Carlos describes Laura in detail, but we’re going to omit that description because he doesn’t want to identify her either. But he attests that she was beautiful. And that she went after so much beauty.
“And when there was the look there it hit. It definitely hit me, it hit her because she returned the look.”
The two began to walk side by side, surrounded by a sea of people. “You can imagine the following, we’re in the block. Then there’s a time when it starts there “it’s pharaoh!”, I love that shit. Then I don’t want to talk to Laura or anyone else, I want to sing the Pharaoh there, you know ? The conversation was basically this, what’s your name? Laura? Carlos, how are you? Then we walk a little more, dance a little more.” And that was it. There wasn’t even a kiss.
Because, minutes after meeting Laura, Carlos felt something strong inside him. The urge to go to the bathroom. He warned Laura and asked her to wait. He queued for half an hour to enter a chemical booth and, when he finally got out, he realized that the ethyl breakfast had not gone down well.
“So, I wanted Laura to say Good Night Cinderella to me, but that wasn’t it, it was just the catuaba. I couldn’t walk any further. The catuaba hit. But it hit and carried me away. And then I left that chemical toilet and I said fuck it, I lost Laura, I can’t go back there. Then, close by, I already went to a corner there between two cars and I got sick.”
After hours sitting on a curb, Carlos was rescued by friends. And he never saw Laura again.
Perhaps, the ball went on for her. Maybe she didn’t even wait for him to go to the bathroom. But maybe she stayed planted, on the margins of a Carnival block, and she never saw the man she smiled at again.
Affliction ate at Carlos. He had a brilliant idea to try to find his fleeting love: hang banners in the busiest places in one of the main neighborhoods of Belo Horizonte, in the hope that she, or someone who knew her, would see the sign.
He spent days thinking about how to put his idea into practice. He had ideas for texts and looked for suppliers who could solve his trap. Finally, on Ash Wednesday, this scheme got off the ground. Carlos knew what he was going to write and had found someone who could produce and hang his creation on the streets of Belo Horizonte.
Carlos’ intention? Having a chance to explain and talk to Laura in a less chaotic way. A more civilized version of everything that happened.
Days passed and emails filled his inbox. Random people and about twenty lauras reached out to him, but none of them were the only ones that mattered to Carlos.
“There were a hundred and nine emails the very next day. I received emails from a bunch of girls saying, forget Laura, come with me. And so, a lot of messages about things on television, on the radio, two emails saying, let’s go make a song for TikTok telling this story”
More than ten Lauras wrote. But none was “the” Laura.
For Carlos, it seems impossible that she didn’t know about all that commotion. The most obvious one is that Laura doesn’t want to be found.
“I would really like to meet her again, talk to her, exchange ideas, explain what happened. I really wanted to explain what happened. As I explained to you. threw me to the ground, literally. I just wanted to talk to her.”
It could be that Laura is reading you, Carlos. Perhaps at least that part of the confusion you have resolved.
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