It's Not the Distance: Letters to My Son Before Every Journey

After every goodbye, a father writes.

Between airports, roads, reunions, and longing, Eugênio turns distance into words addressed to his son, Joaquim. Through the years, these letters follow the boy's journey, recording discoveries, embraces, silences, milestones, and the challenges of a childhood shaped by autism and by a singular way of perceiving the world.

As he tries to remain present even when life requires him to leave, the father also revisits his own story: the early loss of his father, the letters he received from him, and the emotional legacy passed down through generations. In this intimate narrative, memory, fatherhood, and hope are woven together into a story about learning to wait, caring without limiting, and recognizing the many different forms of communication and love.

More than messages written to a son, these pages become a house made of words - a place where absence does not become abandonment, and where affection finds ways to remain.

It Is Not the Distance is a book about fatherhood, neurodiversity, family memory, and the delicate attempt to stay close when life insists on keeping people apart.