Yo Se

Yo se. I know. Not everything, of course, I am still certainly lost. But I know now where it all began, I know what broke, I know how and I know how to come back from it finally.

I am in Spain, in the North, in a navy town on the coast. Went with John to the Ciento party on Friday, with more men in uniform that I have ever seen up close. The town is quiet, though I would not say quaint, the tapas delicious and the coffee the way it is supposed to be (England could learn a thing or two). I spent this morning wandering the streets, only small bakeries open with those perfect, shining pastries that catch my eye and then threaten my tongue with their incredible sweet. I was followed at first by one dog, then more and more, until I had to duck inside of a newspaper shop to shed my strange dog-whisperer moment. I tried to feed the skinniest of all a crossoint but it rightly rejected it, sniffing my bags for meat. I wandered the streets that are filled with colored balconies, with signs warning of siesta, with cafe-bars and trees broken to their hearts (their stumps in place, long-armed branches split open at what would be wrists).

I spent last week in Berlin. It was different than I remembered, in certain ways, and yet the same place I left behind. At first I felt as if I had time traveled, and my most unfavorite friend, the fiend of nostalgia, tugged me back into that tumultuous summer. However, it was oddly peaceful for me in the end. It was returning to a site a love and reclaiming it, rebirthing it as a site I could love in the future, not only in the past. Went swimming with Ufuk´s little brothers, who curled up against us on the water slides, giddy with excitement at the smallest of things--splashing games, McDonalds, ice cream to which the elder of the two sighed...¨this is really wow.¨ Children never fail to remind me of the importance of tiny moments, of the worth of every subtle smile, every cuddle, every day.

The Christmas markets drew me in. I was unquestionably in love with the small stalls holding gluwein and gingerbread, the roasted chestnuts and silk scarves, giant santa clauses (Weinnachtsmann) lite up at night, pink cotton candy, ceramic boots.

We ate turkish food, many brunches, watched videos, wandered the city in the rain. I felt at home there, in Berlin, which for a moment relieved me of my fear of memories.

I am happy. I am happy here, happy in Europe, happy with the life I have chosen. There are things I miss, times that tickle with nostalgia, bent memories of life and laughing, of being home. And yet I am so much less afraid, so much more ok on my own, having broken free of attempts at perfection, having broken my heart more than once (and still come out in one full piece).

Today we drive to Porto and I will serve for Alvarinho and Quinta wine. I am looking forward to the rest of our trip, and then being home, curled up against my cat, seeing my new nephew all fat and full of life.

Ruido

Thanksgiving was full of loud chatter, a long high table, perfect turkey and multiple pies. It was full of the same laughter that enters most conversations here at St. Antony's. And followed by a blue-grass type band that reminded me of home.

I am oddly excited to be on the student government here, perhaps because I already love St. Antony's in this indescribable way, perhaps because it is one of the few places away from Morningside Heights that I have ever felt so at home.

And then there is home, itself. The sound of Thanksgiving at Carol's when I spoke with Kim, my father putting a turkey in the oven, both made me ache for the place that I grew up. I am excited to travel, to see more of Europe, to speak Spanish and explore Portugal. I am excited to face Berlin again. I am most excited, however, to be home.

Noise takes such different forms, from music flooding your ears, sentences of jazz spelled out in tunes. But here, the noise is always welcome, a raw, if raspy, ruido of living.

American Quilts

Glynn and I discussed the merits of American Quilts today. It rained through the sun. I decided to go south--to Spain and Portugal, to drive down the coast with one of my most recent and very best friends.

It's ok when things don't turn out the way you expect them too. That's what living is anyways, rather than predicting or pre-empting or perfection (the fallacy of it all). And it is certainly ok to regret or return, if only in your mind, to recall what was once possible.

It's time for a break...time to be bold.

Every Day

Yesterday, Liana, Sabrina, Thais and I went to Bath. Running to the lodge, wet hair, late as usual, I felt as if I was at home. Over steak and chatter, wandering through the town, photographs with an old Mr. Darcy, the day was warm and sweet. My roommates were sweet as usual, indulging my desires for bath products and coffee. My classmates suddenly boundriless, caught up in pub kisses. There were no disappointments here...only at home. Only in what has been endlessly left behind, in both time and space, not in what was spoken but the loudest of silences. A part of me, a very big part, feels as if in the corner of that room, that world is my own lion waiting to pounce.

And now, with decisions on the tips of my fingers, running through my mind, I feel frozen. Am I just running away again? Or am I starting over? Am I breaking too many promises and expectations to myself and others? Am I breaking my own heart again? And how did it all arrive here, slow steps towards a stubborn in between? Where have I been all of this time?

It's cold here, the frost is running down my lacy windows. A day of baths, French, and a house dinner awaits. And I look forward to these near futures--it is only what follows after, in the weeks to come, that I am afraid of facing.
I think about it every day.

Expectations

There are some things you remain unprepared for, even though you are socialized, grown, cared for in a way to make you ready: ready for the unexpected, for the disappointing, for the draining moments, for the incredible, the insensible, the most beautiful of all.

And yet, you are never really ready. Not for certain, unexpected angles. Not for your own inability to stay put. Not for the hardest beats of your heart.

How I have been running this last year! Running from my own creations, my own promises, my own ideals, my own expectations of myself. And I have run across an ocean, only to end up at the edge of the most familiar, but somehow broken open, bent out of shape.

I feel so much relief here, in spite of the gray skies, in spite of missing the familiar. I quite fancy the softness of the slight storms. I love the long days of reading, writing, biking, breathing freely. I can't help but think about Berlin today--somehow a refuge in my mind (ironic)--of long lawns, rose gardens, grown history, cozy cafes; or napping in the triangular room atop my sister's farmhouse, in the sheets of my childhood home. Of reading novels in my own flowery bed. Of whispering with my niece at night, alight with pre-adolescent gossip and unmatchable love.

For all of the craziness, there are small slices of sunshine: a long-awaited e-mail of forgiveness, of releasing, with the Freudian slip "forgive me" in place of "forget me." And we both forgive each other, but certainly not, not yet ourselves. Forgetting is inconceivable. And we are both still searching for a place that is as simple, as safe, as soft as those years between us.

And now I will confront one of those moments, dreaded, raw, having unfolded all wrong. An end? A new beginning? A sliver of self somewhere in between. Maybe I should have known. Maybe I should have thought back, pieced together those small moments that define individuals and the stories they would like to live. Maybe I wanted to ignore this thread of life unraveling at my feet; maybe I expected far too much of our ocean, I expected it to wash it all away, to cleanse without the sting of salt.

Paper Dreams

It is strange how the unfamiliar bends into normalcy: the expectation to wipe raindrops off of a bicycle seat (what were sleeves for before); heaps of bacon; the constancy of green and grey.

I go through stages here, of complete distraction--perhaps because I am in awe of my satisfaction with this place, this new life of mine; of absorption in my course topic; of fantasizing about a time (before?) (still to come?).

I am glad, though. I am glad that I am used to the rain. That small pubs have become comfortable. That I am sure of certain, stubborn, realities.

So what if these are mostly paper dreams? Most of mine are, anyways, written, raw, revered be me alone.

Parades

Are parades celebration, or simply pebbled streets we stalk? Are they characters, or crimson, lighted alley-ways? Are they dances or daughdry escapes, all done up in drag?

To write about the literal here, what exists, what I cannot exit, would be to write of zig-zagged bike rides before dawn, movie-theaters with assigned seats, peanut oil seeped under skin. It would be to write of dangerous dancing, dribbles of wine, Borat-clad classmates, girls in ties, the crispest of morning lights. It would be to write of North Parade and its constant Christmas strings; the soft-disappointment at missing shortbread; the short braids of tears that are called from the cold. It would be to write of this street, hidden behind a churchwalk, pillaged by passer-bys where windows are awake with another world, un-shattered, showing their rounded, pregant bellies of memorabilia and kind kisses inside of our eyes.

What I like to write out, instead, are the emotions of this world, this walk, the parade (in both a celebratory and geographical sense) that I live each and every day here. It would be to explain the sharp shocks of gray, hands reaching for the small of my back, the weight of curtains, the closest I could be to a fairytale in a novel, foreign, faraway land.

So we are missing witches and warlocks. We are missing princes, of course, and kissable toads. But there is something here, within us, much more magic than I ever witnessed at home. Could the cause be the arches of architecture, the always-changing leaves, mood-rings around our insides, tame at daybreak, adorned in the demise of day?

It is something that reveals itself beneath our gowns, in the bent sunlight on shorn christmas trees, stone houses and open windows where we can surely swing our legs. Broken normalcy. Slippery, buttered-up wings that fly, float in pieces, that fail to bring us back to the hardened earth. It is the wings that save, not the journeys: the places reached above the wanted, wished-for, willed. The moments beyond broken hearts, broken promises. New beginnings, perhaps, but not only new. Far farther above, far more skilled at taking flight .

Because it is ok to run away sometimes, to hide or take deep breaths--breaths that cannot be seen in every winter wind, but speak (if only for a second) what we cannot say in words: they are the crowded clouds we have seeped in, in our fretful flights, in our dreams of falling. Sometimes, they break through our crowns of sky, our tattered teeth, our tied tongues. And they admit to what hurts the most, they give not only witness but life. And these wings, however slight, they are sights to be seen, they are the saddest sighs of relief.

So when I write about parades, about celebrating, about long walks that seem far-away and faintly French, I write about the racket, I write about the speed of my heart. I know. I know that the strength has been given to me to get through, beyond this: to now beckon my own buttery wings.

Blue Skies, Brown Dirt

Gardening is the grasp of my sister thousands of miles away. Potatoes hot with yogurt, cheese and chives. Expanded berry patches and herb areas that fail to frown at these raging rains.

This song plays in the background as I fill my mind with asylum laws, "The Shape of My Heart." And I realize that this is the song I played to as a child, listened to in my neighborhood amongst the closest of friends, a song of cards and love, at once (a failure at a poker face in tune). The girl I babysit for is on the Facebook and has photos of adventures in Morningside Heights. I can't believe how quickly time has passed by...

Two nights ago I sat with Paul at the noodle bar inhaling some of the best food I have had since I got here. I was approached by a little witch, all ready for today (Halloween). "Trick or Treat," she announced. And when greeted by our surprise and tickles of laughter, a second attempt:" Trick or Treat. Seriously." It wasn't even Halloween. No one had candy at dinner. Oh, how I try to understand England...

But of course I can hardly stop laughing. Laughing when we are "late" for formal dinner and scolded. Laughing when I am soaked on my bike in a dress and tights (how young I feel in tights!). Laughing when the iron won't heat (I have turned the knob the wrong way--life feels backwards here). Laughing at the thought of HalloQueen. Laughing at tea breaks and rowing callouses, speed bumps called humps, stories of identifying pregnant spies.

It is within unfamiliarity that new pleasure arises, thick amusement at the novel. I feel like I am back in third grade, dipping my hand into a paper bag, squealing at the many treasures I have stumbled, blindly, upon--not always seen, but felt in my very core, in my most ticklish of selves.

On Tea

A bridge leads to the playground, as a bridge leads to all secret spaces—a stronger pathway than rabbit holes or catapults to our skies. One edge is rounder of this bridge; arranging it as a halo or a teardrop face that looks up at you, then up at our sun. Mothers with quilted babies steer over the resulting hump, swirling down to what look like tugboat trains and borderless, well-fed fields. The sky, as always, is plump with sadness or joy: it is ready to burst into tentacles of tears.

The playground itself is sandy from such persistent storm. Children beckon their parents forward, flailing in the open air of slides and swings, swallowing the darkness with their sallow eyes. Somehow, this playground seems toned down, smaller than my American encounters, centered by seesaws sucking in the wind. My own, small charge leaps forward, when I ask him what he would like to do. “Run” he says and whips himself into the flighty air, his hands red as cherry ice pops, his tongue salivating at the freedom of his feet. Rather than fall, as I am afraid he might, he climbs onto a round ride, centers himself in the middle and waits for me to spin him. Yet I am the one who is disoriented, who feels the skies are somehow smaller, who pulls back the blinds but still must seek out sun.

What I write from, for, is the perspective of one young woman abroad. An American girl in Oxford. A place that, given the lack of language barriers, should saunter slowly into home; but one so unlike my home that I am taken aback by everyday encounters (fried toast!, un-refillable coffee, separate faucets for hot and cold). Here Flapjack is a pastry not a pancake; smiles mean so much more than good-day; stores are filled with racks of gray clothing; the city sleeps at the same moment in which Cinderella’s carriage disappears.

I wander slightly past dawn at the Covered Market. Fruit and vegetable stands are filled with fresh produce; women in paper caps carve cakes out of hardened sugar; the surrounding stone is cold, a bright sky a symbol not of warmth but dry dreariness. The market is charming, with red leather shoes in windows and a scattering of delectable sandwich shops. We sit in Browns, a British diner in my eyes, and order wide dishes filled with meat, eggs, beans, toast (or fried bread!). I think about ordering tea. I opt for my coffee option and am duly disappointed with the dank taste. Tea is the right choice here, even in the Grand Café. Tea and long walks in the rain.

Never-Never Land

This life is lit by small moments, slight miracles. Here, in Oxford, I encounter situations I never thought possible, never-never lands that don't require wings.

On a promise to a friend (our very own John Kennedy) I will write of what I have come to know as home here. The warm, wide room that looks out onto Woodstock Avenue. A college that borders Caterbury Road. Perhaps it is the rain, the raw, fallen leaves of autumn, but it is no mistake that Alice in Wonderland was drawn out of this small world. There are winding streets--North Parade, a cobblestone avenue where Christmas lights blink year round; Merton street, a precious, if empty street, strewn with short, smiling homes. There are nights at the late bar, 2 pound ciders and rounds of pool (and Boggle!). There are long bike rides on my rickety, purple-pink Raleigh bike...basket filled with groceries and articles, an overwhelming desire to wear tights. Conversations about prime ministers and converse sneakers; everywhere is decorated in scarves.

This is a place I never expected to be. And, due to that realization, I am able to capitalize on what are the true magical moments: small winks of wild surprise that take my breath away each day: the skinny staircase at New College made out of giant stones; a chapel library; year-round Summertown; wicked right turns; radishes from the garden club; rowdy rugby matches; school girl outfits; babies with British accents; Harry Potter outfits; dancing, daring, laughing, laughing, laughing.

The people I have met here have (honestly) far exceeded my expectations. While there are, of course, women I have befriended, I am shocked by the close male friends I have made...something that was (aside from the few special ones who know who they are) never a big part of my life.

Of course, what I am studying matters very much to me. However, my desire to write is overwhelming, incredible. If I was not so excited by the still-novel nature of this city, by sandwich shops and long walks, by the university parks and the way my windows open directly onto this world, I would write my life away here. There is not enough space, in writing and time, to describe this place I have found and carved out for myself. I sit here, staring at the ripening green tomatoes on my windowsille, my own collection of scarves, 1970s decor, strawberry scented laundry, and I know that I belong.

Pear Street

The bus that leads up to my house is via Pear Street. This is a spire-inspired world, the streets are small and winding, the colors muted by an alway-sleeping sun. I don't know where to begin, but I am full of exhaustion, the coffee is disappointingly cool, weak as the milky blend I drank as a child. Even when the sky is clear, it feels moist and cold, I am waiting for the clouds to weep.

I miss New York, of course and everyone, but my missing is mediated by how tired I feel, by the quiet, by my curiosity incredibly awakened, with bright, bulging eyes. I have yet to explore the streets of Oxford, only my own, across the way from a school, and one small alleyway that I could not bear to pass.

My room is huge and bright with large, wall height windows that face out onto the front of the house. In the back is a large "garden" (yard) with groomed christmas trees (ahhh the Christmas trees, they follow me everywhere). It feels like a mix between Telluride, a 70s studio and a hotel.

There is so much to say--of the small trains in London, climbable toy trains for me; of pence and getting caught without a ticket exiting the train (which I had bought and promptly lost); of red-wine receptions with ambassadors; cobble-stone streets that I had expected and then entertained; the un-doubtable skies; the disappointment of rose tea (blech); pubs costumed as lodges; roasted lamb and peach pudding; the confirmed knowledge that I would love Notting Hill.

I have never felt so old, so alone and so able in my entire life.

Perusing

What if I got it wrong?
And no poem or song..
Could put right what I got wrong

-Coldplay


One more week until I cross the Atlantic, and the city seems so precious to me. I hate last moments, last walks, last looks, gurgled goodbyes. Everything feels alive, however, the Hungarian café awakening a small smile when the warm iced tea touches my lips, the lacquer on my nails peeled to the bone, the streets littered with flowers and fat cigarette butts, striped in white and gold. Our street flags, perhaps, our New York Look.

In the stores, I am surrounded by slippery, small wonders, things looking out at me with all empty eyes. My insides ache for another time, a walk backwards to the place, the path where Megan and Kim and I licked rainbow ices and centered on stoops. Perhaps it was Megan’s presence, her known bright eyes, the threesome suddenly reunited in a more volatile, violent time. The world seemed softer, then, and I hugged her tight to my chest.

At home, I am surrounded by the blankest of memories…my mind wanders forward fawning streams, blue boats afloat and aflutter on rivers raw with youth. My mind wanders backward to the places where the photos once lay, their tape pulled down by my own, desperate fingers, my frequented failure to follow through.

Inside, I am less elevated, I am wholly in the present, so much more than I have been for a long time. I know I have lost and then lost again. I am not becoming at all immune to the familiar ache, the pull at my heart but I am becoming more realistic, and more whole. I am sorry, still, I am not separate inside; however, I am standing tall, taught, learned. There are so many tomorrows to revel in, so many more smiles to be had. There is so much more to the world than this. Over coffee with Amy, dainty plates with Emma, chortled laughter with my parents...I am dancing, delighted, dangling outside of the present remorse.

England falls in my lap at the ideal time, a precious walk to another moment. I tell myself it is an event, a promise, a purse of life’s lips, a gift in time. (not a wrinkle in time in the least, rather an acceptable escape route).

Now I know. I know I am bold, in certain ways, but not in all the ways I had hoped for. I sprung forward, singing my slight tune...I was tickled by it all but the romance shattered and I shunned by the shadows I hid from for far too long. Now I know what my mother has gone through. Now I know I hate only abandon.

Maybe it is the Corona. Maybe it is the moonlight. I am tired, less tense, here tripping into a world I never thought I would know. What if I was wrong? What if I was wrong again? This is a moment of so much to say but all certainty stifled. And I am alright, not dancing, but slightly delighted (at a possible resilience? at my same pink pajamas and ponytail? at the (guilty) relief?). I am perusing my past and my present...and it is through these shy glances that I can recreate my expectations. I promise no more games or grown-up gossip; I promise to go only for the grasp of my gut. That is where the answers lie, really--not in advice or aching, not in the head or the heart. The gut, the belly, my favorite round of life.

Pheasants on the Run

Life is a series of pinchings--soft, sweet, subtle, always harsh against our many skins. When I look back on the last year, I am flooded by the colors of such living. Undoubtedly, the turquoise of my first cafe; the yellow-brown of my first love's sad eyes; stubble, dark and gray against my lips; gray slate of Berlin; the open, cherry mouths of the infamous wall; bleeding Argentine hills; red-headed houses and hollow calves; headless chickens fleeing death.

And here, preparing for my move abroad, I am plump with apology, pent-up or purged from my every day with small attempts at smiling. What are apologies worth anyway? I expected to return from Wisconsin ready to make amends, to wrap my arms around him, say our sincere sorries and except. Yet my actions were silenced suddenly, the muted memories sentenced barriers between us. If I opened my mouth, no words would have exploded, my arms, no embrace would have told the full story that is waiting to be spoken. I am somewhat relieved that he is no longer mine and somehow in pieces, fully breathless at the very thought of the small world I have overrun.

I have only recently realized that we are gone.

To accept, then, has been my greatest goal. Over long breakfasts with childhood friends, hours-long phone calls, trail running, long walks across a city I am trying to claim again as my own, my own alone. It is only recently that I have embraced this reality, however sticky with dissent, however ill-fitting and uncertain, however cold against my chest.

Wisconsin, then, was a small retreat for me. Picking tomatoes and prickly cucumbers, to be drowned in pickling jars. The soft fur of Maggie the highlander calf. The pink underbelly of the golden dog. The ratted curls of my niece. The round, warm belly of my pregnant sister, an embodied grin of future. Coffee with maple syrup. An elf house discovered kayaking. Blueberry cake and homemade pizza, endless twizzlers and pop performance, hoppy kegs and elderberry wine, bubble baths and pheasants on the run.

What a racket there is in my head, when I am piecing together the past and the present, the possibilities that will die in the ticking moonlights, that pull at my indecision, my sudden inability to know what is right, to ascertain my nooks. I am holding onto each moment, not as if it is my last, but holding onto its every whispering of life, every touch and taste-an incorporation of these bent beings, of those I love. Perhaps there are last mentionings, last dances. And yet, I am so much less afraid than before. I know, we all dance again.

New Spaces

Rising at dawn reminds me of Kosovo and the same wild roosters that racket our own country. Sometimes I expect to look up at the quilted curtains, a reminder that the Mediterranean is only a stone's throw away. A reminder that the air, though thick with remorse, is fresh and focused, always cool enough to lull to sleep.

Here, we harvest vegetables and cook elaborate meals from fresh produce, zucchini bread, salads, roasts, the earth still fresh at our forks. One of my favorite parts of harvesting is the fact that I can just take a bite out of vegetables, sit gnawing on a cucumber only seconds ago pulled from the ground. This can be relaxing, the physicality mixed with the satisfaction of production, the startling beauty of purple potatoes and brandywine tomatoes an added sensation of warmth. Here I do not notice the smell of garlic on my hands or the dirt caked under my fingernails. I notice, instead, the soft red fur of a calf, the cry of a goat, the way the sun burns my temples even in the morning.

The music at the barn dance was wonderful and made me want to dance and dance. The taste of our ice-cream startling, the caramel dripped into small, frozen veins.

When I think about England, exiting the here and now for a moment, imagining the months to come, I panic. I panic, not because I don't want to go but because of what I am leaving behind. I panic because my heart hurts even here and while it can be calmed by a cup of coffee, laying down chicken feed, writing of other lives, running in the woods, it is restless and riddled. I am looking forward to my new place, space, where I will be focused on much that matters to me. Yet I am incredibly afraid of abandoning my own aftermath here.

Clueless Renoirs

Are there ways to shard, confine, carve out space for long life moments in words? I find myself longing for Berlin, the bent over bated breath, the boldness I unleashed, demanded and then payed heavily for, raw if rickety moments that looked at me longingly, those clueless Renoirs, far less beautiful in front of my eyes.

Being lost is no condition, it is a crevice--often the smallest of spaces, cast-iron quicksand or cordial cages, devoured bread paths home, rickety rabbit holes with worn, wooden shells. In the moments, months of falling, I have sought small handles, hard surfaces and bright benchmarks to elevate. What is crushed, shattered, while remarkable is not remakable and now the marked moments, measured and mounted by me alone, are pungent pieces, a whole horror of hollow dust.

Waitressing was my ammunition or distraction, at least one way away. It was no place for floods or flipping, rather a begging for my brightest persona.

Maybe it is Berlin--so swept up in its own transformation, too lost and torn, too trapped and grappling where I see, find myself. Maybe it is the raw, that while wretched, is all that has rung true. I just want to be sure again, of some large step, sweeping life movement not mime.

Brand New Key

One night, nicked by Europeans who refused to hail a cab, shot by swarms of red wine and meat, the bartender spun up the volume on our joint-life soundtrack and I smiled, grinned, heartily laughed out the world.

I am en-gnarled, tangled, tied up in nostalgia-the most forlorn of forgetting, the ghosts of ghosts. For me, this is not rare but even at a restaurant, the blue one, the one on which I banked my wild waitress dreams.

I want to fold into words the less marginalized of memories, sashey of belted Brazilian music melting my ears, the soft freckles across Alice's nose, bent basement kisses, white waists, novel mentionings of moonlight.

It is the astronomist, with his misty eyes, who has kept me sane. The menagerie of futbol fans who have kept me fed. The washed, turquoise curtains that have blocked the burn of suns. Tin and wooden tables that have kept me strong. Broken stairs that have kept me startled--those stairs that laugh and trip, trickled with footsteps home.

When I close my eyes, I can smell granola and cranberries, almost crisp with dawn. I can taste fat slices of steak, melting cheese, crusted bread, cool arugula and whole curtains of coffee, stunning back my brawn. I can hear the assortment of music, soft blues, gypsy kings, feist and other feisty tunes, feel the blow of the fan, a torrid tickle at best.

It is all that I imagined and more, more, more.

The more is the key. The most. Never mild.

I love and hate waitressing, feel fire in my eyes these days. The repetition, monotony, murders my creativity. The cast of characters far superior to sentimental stories, perfectors of plots.

Back to the Days of Christopher Robin

Sure, I am listening to Kenny Loggins, but I cannot deny turning to this song when I am feeling nostalgic or just kind of sad. I know everyone disappoints but days like today, when I feel warm with Cuban food but afraid to slam the door, when I want to crawl into my room as a whisper, unheard, bring me back to those days (not of Christopher Robin, per se, but Polly Pockets and birthday cakes broken above city sewers, my celebration cakes in shards). I guess I should learn (from myself, as well) that we all disappoint, slip up, slip back, recovery is raw and unreal, always tippable. But now I need to be writing my Truman report and I am sitting here, staring at the tear-shaped map of Orient and my barbie-pink nails, feeling so small. I don't want to write, render the past year in pen. I want to tuck myself into bed with my book and my cat.

The song, now that I think about it and place it in the computer, that really brings me back is Disarm. My sister gave it to me my 5th grade Christmas and I loved this song as I had never before loved a lyric and its melody, those Siamese twins themselves. The Album was called Siamese Twins and there was a floating baby on its cover, soft and smiley.

I shouldn't be complaining but this is my rawest point: a point that reminds me of sledding escapes, so much snow, but mostly broken cakes and broken paint. I wish my sister was here or that I could call Julie, but it is much too late.

Mostly I am lucky, I know, and I cannot wait for my Harry Potter school, and seeing my sister's belly before birth, breathing, full with life.

Breathe Me

On the magazine cover left on table 4, there is a bikini clad woman made out of carrots, all shards, all pieces. The man next door sits on the corner table outside, clad in plaid (per usual), rejoicing in the bark of his Dalmation, exchanging flan and flogging with his true New York speech. We shuffle back and forth, having lost all curiosity but still true to the art. The nights end prematurely, Europeans declining the signs that the restaurant has laid its head to rest. With mint tea and cappucinos, bendable bikes, they charge into the night, soft vocals that not only penetrate but disquiet my memory. At 11, my coworkers are dancing, 1980s song steaming the radio, their aprons around their ankles, fat with exhaustion and the exhaust of the streets. The chefs are drinking coca-colas on the street corner. And I, with my guarana and this strange magazine of edible women, am trying not to close my eyes, trying not to exit the euphoria of sitting, waiting, sipping, Breathe Me playing in the background of this small world. I am happy in these moments, though tired--warm inside,.

Berlin is what draws me out, encouraged by conversations, the music, the men seated under our silocone sky. I am lost in the overwhelming emotions I had there--even the thought of them quicken my heart. What love.

The cafe, civil and stern below my apartment; the grand garden where I witnessed the reign of the old east; the familiar ride to work, the small French crossoints prepared by a small, French lady; Spanish cinema; devlish department store bakeries; crusty rolls; quick steps; sleepless nights; virtuality; broken plants, unpotted, uprooted by my toes; sheep rugs; raw sunrise wrecking the path to Prague.

This is the most vivid, heart-wrenching and yet beautiful of my memories. There was nothing, nothing but a pure, if purposeless feeling. I fell victim to my own lake of yearning, wall-less, swordless--no way to protect the very heart of it all.

I am not lost today, as I was then. Do not attempt to lose myself in urbanity, forgetting or fretting or fawning independence. This city, just as Berlin, has a way of bringing me back, swinging me (with real possibility of falling) into a past, fat as our ankles at midnight, of both goblins and grace.

There are women at the restaurant dressed all in green, or tickled in turquioise gems that match the walls. A middle aged woman with a cat-eye shirt, where the two green gawkers cover her nipples. Between iced lattes and other simple concoctions, I manage to shrug of exhaustion, manage to beat back my thoughts. Now this is the most honest of love-hate relationships of my life: this cool. cubed restaurant and I, full of friends and temptation, pallatal sensation and severe windows, misshaped and sharded, into the lives of others.

Which brings me back to Berlin. Bent subway tracks and three-legged dogs. Symphonies and Turkish restaurants, leafy tea. That belly of history, pushed to the forfront, frantic if full in monument. Stalinist homes side by side with the small, quaint canal abodes. How I could have been home there, if only I could have quieted the lake inside, a pool of underwater creatures that have no name.

If I could go anywhere in the world, it would be Berlin, both a reality and a memory of heat and longing, hurt, regret, love. Because, if I could breathe, unveil, re-create the most essential me, she would be intensely sensitive, touched by each moment to laughter or tears, slayer of iciness, acutely responsive to the racket inside, and unable to say goodbye. Uninhibited if not refined. Cognizant of bird songs, broken day breaks, hollowed hearts. Inescapably empathetic, perhaps, but always present, always home.

No Room for Angels Here

The big apple is bitten open in the hottest months, forgotten by the city’s young and rejected by the richest of mice, rats and men. The galas, the garden parties, the select instances that make up for no real pleasure in the sun are something expected: events, eventual(s) that fill up kitchen-wall calendars and the hand-held horrors that have replaced real life. Instances, as a young middle-class New Yorker are my own: I bloody my hands on their small pleasures, soft purrs un-kitten-like in my throat.

The first I attend, at the hand of my father’s strange connections, is a celebration of life of a man hatful and hated, a small cocktail party with fat shrimp and glasses slippery with champagne. Performing my waitress skills, I slip my fingers out from under the glass bodices, practicing roulette on their round bottoms, crystal and crystalline as the too-blue pool where I learned to float. The men are older, of course, than their companions, an aggrieved given, their golden statues far less than lovely. Their women are pulled tight not only in outfits, but also in the skin that once crowded their eyes: the most empty of crows faces, on simple stilts as wonderful as pressed, dried, flower stems, shorted worth. I search for other empty stares, avoiding companion and am approached by a fat, too stout woman with the bluest of eyes. Her husband follows, wrinkled, wrought with age, his ears curled at the bottoms like subpar conch shells (pulsing, pink, a sea inside), his face a polka canvas invented by sun. He is filled with stories that light him, only slightly, like a quarter moon, and leave me agitated, breathless, burnt by this undead man.

“I hear you are a traveler,” he says, meeting my eyes with his own. “I too like to travel. My first honeymoon, with my first wife was in Mayorca. As circumstance had it, I ended up with another woman and was making my way back to the hotel one night. I never realized the truth alive in the New York statement, the city that never sleeps. Everything was closed, even the front of my hotel, sleeping. So I thought I would make my way down to where our suite was—on the bottom of a mountain-side—slipping into the room to find my wife. But, I realized on the way down, just how steep it was, and found myself understanding that if I didn’t jump, falling would rip out my insides. So I took the plunge and ended up at the bottom, passed out, with broken teeth. Somehow, I managed to drag myself to the hotel, where I passed out again. Luckily, there was a hotel doctor.”

Maybe my eyes do not do justice to my thoughts. At that moment, lacking an understanding for his story’s point, thoroughly disgusted at this uncertain creature, I find myself fixated again on the champagne, small bubbles that resemble a child’s bated, underwater breath, small moments of life at effort to escape glass and the gummy smiles of the wealthy. His wife takes his hand, holding tight to the disappointing child inside of him, as I balance a cup on my thumb almost hoping for a shattering, at, on, within this man. Thinking of him toothless makes me smile wide, a man gurgling cherry red at the bottom of a mountain that taught him his time is torrid, soft storms always await.

The second I attend is milder but more beautiful. It is situated in the Pierre, atop a winding staircase that serves Upper Class weddings and debutant balls. There is no room for angels here. The men and women, simple, single, slighted by each other, suck soft water from tall wine glasses, like wide-mouthed bass afraid of a drowning. Amazing Grace is sung from these gurgling throats in a church-choir unison and again, the men resemble babes, bald, broken, tears spilling down their faces in giant, dramatic outpours, united mourning. They are celebrating recovery, but not recovered. They are celebrating over-coming mountains far taller than Mayorcan cliffs, finding the right footing or being forced into treatment centers with literally nutty names (such as Hazelton, the cool companion of even famous singers and their yelping young). They speak of “group” as an inside story, the certain circles where they beat out their demons, embracing drought. They are engaged only in an awesome overcoming, aided but never aged, ogled and ornate in their costume both inside and out.

These are the people who have crossed over, not in the Ghost Whisperer sense of touching death, not by seeing lights, blurred at night or true at sunrise. These are people who have hit rock bottom at best, belleyed hell.

Molasses Past

What of my tangerine ties? My memorabilia built like leggos in my mind. My molasses past, thick as quick sand, civily stormy at best. I look at the orange seats on the subway, fold my legs underneath in a reassurance of youth, tuck my notebook under my arm and allow the stale air to bring me back, sever the now, sidle along a present that I refuted, refused and another present, both empty and bold (a bitten cafe au lait, sucking back at the wind).

Sometimes, I allow myself to go back, though it will later ache, I let loose the reigns on my thoughts, galloping towards warm snow, hollow hotels, strawberries and cream, empty cans, framed photographs, choreographed dances, dirt roads. The roads have been paved, I am told, the brick house painted a lime green (what does green mean? life, again, perhaps, or the semi-sweet of mint, the bittersweet of survivil). Sometimes, I allow myself to wallow in a world that is no longer my own, to drag my feet through that molasses past, what will always be a warmer place.

But warmth, in all of its glory, could not provide the steam, the heat. It was comfortable, rather than thrilling, constant rather than a scalding cold. Is it wrong to miss so fiercely? Sometimes, some days, some moments, I feel like I am violating, I am betraying if only in my scattered mind. But my loyalties, split apart, severed, siamese at best, question mark these thoughts. I am told by a friend, when curled around my pillow, that I myself look like a question mark: I am following the form of my heart.

Waitressing is wearing me out. I want to begin the next stage of my life, release myself from this in-between where I cuddle with my past, wonder at my present, wish on everything (not just stars but also street signs, full moons and red wine, fleshy arms, flashing storms). I am looking for the dawn. My dawn. Doe-eyed, distant, gated.

Hope

Of course I am sad and feel an extreme sense of loss. I am angry. I am disappointed, most of all. Yet, at the same time I feel so filled with hope that it frightens me. I am so filled with longing for a new beginning and have been presented with the most timely of opportunities. Everything arrived from Oxford, was waiting for me at home, and I saw, leafing through the information, just how lucky I am. I am lucky to be going to Oxford, to get this extraordinary intellectual opportunity. I am lucky to be in Europe, at a hub of international travel. I am lucky this is now, so close I can almost touch it. I am lucky for the friends and family that I have.

I want to see my sister before I go. I am thinking, now, of going earlier to Europe, both Julie and Nick said I could stay with them before I move to Oxford, Nora will be in Italy/Spain, I could see my remaining friends in Germany, then Julie might be going to France. Maybe I should go take an intensive French language program. Go write in Cambodia. Go back to Argentina and write. It isn't about running away anymore, postponing the possibilities, now it is simply about seeing, enjoying and understanding the world.

I wish I could stay in New York for awhile, but the truth is that it is simply too hard for me at this point, so full of meaningful memories and recent regrets. I am hopeful, though, that it will all work out for the best, for all of us. For the first time in a long time I have real faith in myself and the decisions I have made. Everything is clear, so suddenly, once I allowed myself to do what I knew deep down was most honest, fair and true to myself. I made some real mistakes along the way, hurt people that I love deeply (and also been hurt by them), but this is where I belong at this point in my life. And I know I will be ok. There is just so much more to me than being a partner, a lover. It is an important part, but only a part and one that I have allowed to determine my life and myself for the past decade. I have learned so much, though painstakingly, the last year--wonderful and horrible things, soft, sweet, harsh, frustrating things. And the hope that I have comes from my realization that I have so much left to learn. And that I will know, I will decide as I have decided, I will be sure one day.

A Smaller Horizon

This is the place where birch trees meld into the striped horizon, our star-spangled eyes affixed to the notes of familiar song (a warm but wilted blanket, certain and civil around our necks). If shed together, all would be violet, the seeping blood of skies and veins, rigid warmth wrecked by the fall of day. This is America, violet and violent at once, small sterns fretting in the grease of a dirt-grass ocean. This is America, with plastic, compartmentalized lawn chairs, grandparents holding tight to sun-spotted hands, small gazebos that cannot coat, propel, protect from the rawest of rains. And deep beneath, seated in the inner rings of willows, pillowed pollen of communities, is some sort of love, tepid but true, tangled and torn, a pinched pirate sail not bowing to the storm.

While saviors, small and large, make their way into song, it is the blue-grass beat and belted words that stand out, the Dixie cups flowing with gingerale, the bug spray roaring back at beetles, the grease-sweat pizza boxes, bent brass belts, girls in hellish heals, babies with unimposing flags affixed to their still-spurting hands. At moments, these flags present themselves as worn appendages, grown from the wrists of the perfectly blonde children, curls that speak to a prairie already conquered and quit. They wave with joy, our small angels, quiet patriots, portable totems of federal fight. They hang upside down, run through the mediocre lawn, wretched with bloody knees, but bright eyed, plump with love. At no moment do they drop the flags, saying to their elders that they already know, that their fleshy legs, chipmunk cheeks are full not with summer berries and corn, but a pickled pride (one set within to season and burn from the very moment they were spit forth from their mothers’ watery wombs).

Our small Americans stand out in the crowd of grandmothers and grandfathers, fallen exhausted, too bright but beaten back by banking on pent-up possibility. They are grounded, give in to small dances, but delight mostly in the knowledge that they are here, home. I am delighted too, by the small waterfalls and lasting rainbows, stairs etched in mountains, reminding me of the world above red roofs, beckoning belonging. But this is America, I am told by the song and the crowd, the callouts to soldiers, the miniature flagged hands, the calluses of my urban upbringing somehow vacant from this smaller horizon. It takes vengeance on that other America—corrupt, cornered, cruel. Instead of the bed of horny hostilities lies an unhallowed dream, a gentle cooing of custom. Here no one bowls alone.

To which America is it that I belong? To which bright, banished, or bored nation? Can I deny, even with the stark cries inside, the swelling of my heart at this song, the certainty, the gracious grin in knowing I am here, home.

Urban Orchards

There are no true urban orchards, but there are places where you can sink your feet, summon the sun, black out the beatings of summer in the city storms. There are streets, too, with such names--nonstarters as they lack aesthetic beauty (but are certainly bright with life). Life is not faint on the lower east side...in fact, the small streets startle back the cars, roars are from windows and hidden treasures of tea, trinkets, tricks. Cupcakes only cost $1.50. Restaurants sometimes seat under a dozen wanderers. What wild of urbanity.

It is within this wilderness, one of the only wilds left for me, that I find small peace. Small peace is all that I search for these days after off-setting my own path, shaking up and then shuddering at the realities created by my thin frame. I sometimes wonder how such a frail body can be so fierce, I am told. This is Kiki, wild and shameless, I am reminded by another. It is not pride that I hold in not holding back, firing my will and worries in the street, in my tears, at the top of my lungs. There are real hurts, true endings, doors I have slammed in my own face, locks I pick and pick with no avail (I am not skilled at breaking and entering), a cryptic confusion I have spread--my own small, scaring wildfire.

But certainties, however small, still serve as comfort. Imagining the rise and fall of my sister's belly, now full with life. Landing on an orange chair in the subway, my book wrinkled and read at my fingertips, my feet tingling with the raw life that waitressing breeds (exhaustion, in short). There are tastes--cold seltzer, rye bread crusts, black licorice, squash soup--distinct and defining, momentary grins. Photographs of Oxford, where I will spend the next two years--ally-ways that I imagine will enthuse my art. Friends faces over coffee or Corona. Limes.

There are certainties of myself that, however slowly, do return. On a walk in Chinatown with a friend, I am reminded of the comforting clink of dim sum, my love of steamed red bean buns, the days when I burst alive in the stores plump with cosmetics, teas, twisted ginger. We stand on a corner listening to a Chinese man sing, albeit with lyrics at his eyes, surrounded by a community we can not infiltrate, find ourselves in, but certainly can enter freely, as soft onlookers, receiving smiles or better yet, nothing. I am asked how tall I am (tall, I respond), recently commonplace in my life. I am tall. I am a city girl. I am in love with eating and greeting. I am still sad.

Being sad, confused, a little lost, that is life my friend tells me. It is as certain as the clinking heartbeat of my soon to be niece/nephew, small births and deaths of imaginings, hopes, histories, fraught of course with graspings, gropings, gaspings, clawings for clarity. All is opaque, I might add, though sometimes warm and blue, sometimes bright, tangerine and other times that dreaded red, the sure blood on our hands.

When I see him now, and all you all know who he is, my heart beats and breaks. It burns with the sudden nostalgia that only this man and that portion of my life can alight. It still hurts as it did over a year ago, so sore at my very core. But he seems stronger and somewhat of a stranger to me and all I ask for, if anything, is that his clouds have come to pass.

Of course I have been in real orchards, apple picking, cherishing pumpkins with which I would create monsters and moons. They are places to get lost, to bite into sweetness, to bask in autumn, the annual dawning of life. Today, as in Germany, Argentina, Chile and every small street here I have known, I try to understand the orchard, the fallen fruits, the sudden turns, the stern sins, try to brighten at the bank, condemn the corners. On Orchard Street itself, in a re-arranged coffee shop, with an au lait in my hands, I reminded just how raw, alive and brazenly beautiful every urban orchard is.

The Weight of Ketchup

That is one thing I have learned--running up and down the stairs at Cafe Colonial, the heave of ketchup in my arms. The right way to hold a breadknife. The fastest route around tables. Shorthand and long hours on my feet. The purposelessness of so many moments, the standing still, like a deer alight in headlights, wondering, why...what am I doing here???

Waitressing is fine, even fun sometimes. The people I work with warm and wonderful. The meat, cheese breads, caipirinhas, somewhere far beyond satisfying. However, I have broken my promises to myself: my promise to write every day, my promise to make that my life, my promise to move beyond, to be set on smiling, my promise to run and reach and revamp my life. I miss the rivers, the mountains, the mute backgrounds on which life is much more beautiful. Small buildings, swaying trees, cozy coffee shops do nothing for my curiosity any more: I want to be back in mountain towns with my Mate bag, startled and starving for more. Thinking about going to Cambodia, with Benny's encouragement and my own boredom washing over me more and more every day. I want to dare the world, dive much deeper, stop delaying the divine.

Your Song

I am on the plane (ok, I am typing something I hand wrote on the plane...). I am leaving Buenos Aires and suddenly the whole world seems slippery. It has rained for two days but somehow the water has not warped even the smallest part of me. Somehow I remain, am recalled, walking in circles: storming Florida street with my latest sigh (though I slightly like ending up, again, at this edge not of reason but of reasonableness), crashing back into the life I left behind. Silence is not easy...the mind's uncertain storm. However, my mind is more easily paralyzed by the pouring not of skies but the pouring, pounding of my own predictability. Now, I know how I have hurt (a hundred ways). Some days, somehow, someways I know why.

I hate goodbyes, as I hate volcanoes, heights, burning my tongue. I am afraid to return, more than anything else (in every sense of returning). I am afraid of going back (to too many beginnings and middles and messy endings). I am afraid I could belong here, was made to run and roar and rock the boat. I am afraid, no matter where I am, that I will always be somewhere farther and farther away.

What does it mean to go back, when you know, when everyone knows you were escaping, inhabiting a world not your own for some kind of sanctuary or safety, from too long a raging rain? I LOVE this city (sorry Julie, I know your opinions lie somewhere else :) ). I love this whole face of the world (now I know you are there with me on this one...).

I have outrun the rain. I have shivered at the side of streets. I have craned my neck to the sky, a more than plastic or paper crane, my own 1000 wings or wild ways aflutter inside. I have conquered (ok, not fallen off of) a volcano, in terror. I have held new friends tight, fallen asleep under the low, wide ceilings that make me warm and the too tall, interrupting the stars. I have embraced a coffee substitution (not forever) and dutifully doubted the chocolate, wrestled open a hobbit door, run on slate-gray pebbles, failed to resist, sunk my toes into an ocean, high boots, wet sand, laps, other lions' lares.

Sometimes the world, change, luck, offers you the opportunity to breathe, to amaze and be amazed in the maze of life. It is an opportunity for grace *not prayer, simply the sense of surviving. It is circles, I tell you. Lying in bed, my last day in Buenos Aires, back in the same hostel, dressed in my same pajamas, Enya (in Nicole's music collection) interrupts my thoughts. It is just like Christmas in mom's room--I am home. No wonder there are pine trees everywhere.

This is no miracle, grace is something softer, the cooing baby of miracles that snorts and snores and sighs. It may disappoint but it does its duty in healing.

The Memory of Trees

Writing a goodbye is worse than speaking the words, is even worse when there is nothing to squeeze tight in your arms and make violet. Writing a goodbye is not simply sad, it is somehow stolen. Oh no, not nostalgia, it is far too soon for that. But here I am, standing, shuddering at a Lion King beginning (every beginning a broken edge of the round), panting music on my ears, always only words at my fingertips.

I have studied these streets, fallen asleep in a friend's embrace, sipped tinted wine under the moonlight, climbed an icey volcano without desire, dared to dance hot and heavy in the belly of Uruguay, braided my hair, held a horse, cooked an Easter dinner, identified Christmas (there are so many pine trees here!), walked alone. And it is through the trees, really, that I have outlined and underlined what I most love, reveling in...later rejecting...a pattern poised in my very own past.

Buenos Aires is the city of trees, trimmed, true to their form, not trivial trees. Buenos Aires is the city of trees, holding their own on and between the streets, saluting storms and stormy travelers making strides, or armies of citizens making their needs known. Buenos Aires is certainly not mine and it is with these whispering beings that it keeps wanters out, only wanderers in. It overflows with gardens, grabs at you with the tongs of troubled lungs, sordid air that cannot ever hold the promise of pleasing.

Bariloche is the city of pine. To me, this is Christmas. To me, a city girl, this is a given or getting, a warm, seasonal place somehow pregnant with my own childish memories. It is one of those locations already dreamed of before encounter, already alive (though warped) within. Bariloche somehow brings me back to my Costa Rican cradle, shorn of my family for the first time. It is filled with chocolate, hobbit doors into a world that is worth waiting for, worth wading within.

Mendoza is the land of sycamore trees, spotted tiger tracks, nature´s winding palms, springing forth in summer to block the sun. It is a land I somehow could not understand (was it all the vines, tied so tightly around the air, even there in the fields following the airport, the lane to the sky?).

In Pucon, the trees are harder to catch, with your eyes or insight. The trees may be babies blocking the sun, are blocked themselves by the stern volcano and its certain summits. But they are in no way less than beautiful. Maybe, in their silent splendor, seeping breath, they are as trees are meant (coarse compliment, without which we would be real corpses) to be.

Is anything meant to be?

The Gray of Pigeons Confirmed

¨But she had no memory of how to be brave¨

I have found it, with certain maple tables, heart-backed chairs, slung back against forlorn walls. Cafe Brasiliero, overloaded with American music making waves, Uruguayan friends implanted in windown seats, shaking with lust.

I spent an entire day walking: I could say (lie) exploring, spitting forth with fire to find something, somewhere, somehow wonderful. In reality, a poor reality perhaps, I was searching for an outlet, my Montevidean perching place. I found it, too, in the smallest hour, but out of curiosity, wonder, the wickedest of wants, spurned it and moved on. Like most wonders, lovely life nooks, it slipped into my past upon return, fastly forgotten. I regressed and found only open streets, sighing with my whole: sidling upon these split-upon sidewalks, simply wanting, wanting...

I have found it again today (can breathe easy), and the cafe, itself, a stone ledge of my final hours here, is less than warm. But here my fingers can walk in horrid ren pen (never again!), can sip milky coffee (spurning my stomach) and fall into a world that is not, entirely, my own. That is entirely not my own, in fact.

¨There was in the air that kind of distoration that bent you a little; it caused your usual self to grow slippery, to wander off and shop, to get blurry, bleed, bevel with possibility.¨

I am glad that it is almost raining, a racket of awakening. Although I wanted to lie on a bench in that rose garden, slide my tongue over sugary cashews that always smell better than they taste and admire old women and their mean Mates (not dogs), it is the streets that inspire me, the city, not foreign but fact, that roars within (the most livid and learned of lions), lies beneath my toes, gurgling like 10 newborns bursting blue with life.

I want to thank my father for inspiring a love of the Spanish language. I want to thank my mother for listening to my stories outloud for years. And my sister--a beautiful writer who did not choose that path--for showing me the words. I think always of her first short story, Blueberry Hill and my following copy-cat (copy-Kat) moves, Cranberry Mountain, Strawberry lake, Blackberry Mountain...the most irritating of complements, awefully inspired, making me hers. I also want to thank her for telling me my first descent poem in primary school was beautiful, despite being about overtaking devils. And I want to thank my parents for smiling wildly at my 8th grade graduation when I read a piece about two people dancing. Naked. On a bed. Even when my dean´s face turned the reddist of reds and I beamed with pride and clicked my heels and knew that I was home.

Of course, I wrote about things, places, people I didnt know and now, too, write about the unknown: or better yet, how I come to know through the smallest of moments, the most miniscule openings of the sky.

This sounds like a prologue to some unwritten book, but it is not. It is a coming home. Another sort of falling in love. ¨I feel alive and relevant, living my life this way...¨

How will I describe Uruguay, what I have seen, sipped into my eager eyes. Colors are certain, civil but blown open. The streets are red with little yellow life lines, veins stepped upon proudly and in protest, pitied and broken open by motoscooters and waspy taxi cabs (the fire, the force, the submarine-night shade). So many men carry guitars, yearn to play the drums (not dance but devour the dancing). I do dance, for hours, to Brazilian music that sucks me in, Nicole at my fingertips, singing songs my ears are virgin to. Last night, at this place (Pony something), a man whispered in my ear in Portguese and while I kept on dancing, while I did not understand anything other than the word girl repeated raw a dozen times, it was something beautiful, something to hold tight in a single breath.

What strikes me the most here are the young boys riding mountains of carted trash, attached to thin, spotted horses: urban grim-reapers, sporting only Orpheus eyes, but no music, no madnessin tow to call back from the underworld, any kind of true (or even chalky, forged, erasable) love.

The streets, the gray of pigeons confirmed, overlapped, lapping up the faded Caribbeans facades (as only a port city could do), has slipped inside of my heart. Everything feels at once divine and moderate: moderated by the miniscule population. (A belly not empty but impossibly airy: a certain city where there is always room to dance).

The waitress here could fit, fold into the spine of any story, hardback book. She wants to be a rockstar, or so speaks her hair, cut jaded, sharp but sure, like a good Uruguayan woman who speaks in ustedes and saunters so. She wears all black, less uniform than show, staring defiantly into the corner where I lean over my book: all done up in red like a failed exam.

This is a place to which I will return: hatted men selling small packaged knives; far too many street children; and those middle aged women with slinkly necklaces, sophisticated glasses, brown shawls that are everywhere. Those transnational mtohers: impossible not to spot even with the blindest of eyes, who make such a cold as there is in this old cafe, such a shivering, slip off, slip under their shawls, their worn breasts, their patterned parakeet steps. They give warmth. They are the heart. They are the bearers of the beauty I so treasure in every moment of living, bearing, breaking, bellowing, beaming: of a borrowed belonging.

What Ifs

I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!
-Alice in Wonderland

No success riding bicycles today, as the chains unleashed themselves, flying high into the air, aereal kites made out of raw iron ore. We walked this beautiful port city again and again; I could walk it a 1000 times. The streets are (cliche?) cobblestone, the old houses of bright Caribbean colors, despite their Atlantic spines. As I walk (forward?), I try not to look back in anger, like that Oasis shrine to which I danced and bawled out my 5th grade loves. I try not to look back at all (to yesterday or yesterday's yesterday).

Last night we ate at a restauarant with a button-clad waiter, with a hot-dog hat and a cloth napkin rabbit. We ate that fine, French vanilla ice cream and drank a bottle of Riesling. Needless to say, neither of us have much tolerance and we tottered home in such laughter I blinked back unsad tears.

We sat on the beach, on the rocks, with our mosquito-bitten legs outstretched, sharing things I blush at thinking, let alone allow to slip from my Skittle lips (yes, skittle, the lipgloss I won at our Wait Avenue Oscar Trivia last year). Uruguayans are serious Mate fiends, which makes me flower with smiles at least a dozen times a day. My favorite flower of life lies on a tiny, spindly street here, wide, wispy, orange with a chocolate core (of course).

Julie, my Faulkner-loving friend, is leaving tomorrow. Sad. It will likely be months until I see her again, but soon we will be British neighbors, in garden land, with our very own Mary Poppins bicycles.

What do I love here? The tinyness of it all; the professional pharmacists (seriously); the warmth (in every which way); the what-ifs. What do I not love? There are sicamores here too, with their spotted spines and sucked-dry leaves, bent over in branded age.

I am intensely curious about Montevideo and looking forward to a few last days in Buenos Aires (writing, steak). I cannot believe (do I want to believe?) that I am going home. Although I am excited, I am afraid of what will await me there, of those unavoidables: those true ghosts, not skeletons, not sicamore sighs.

Better Yet...Of Beauty

¨It is not news, that we live in a world where beauty is inexplicable and suddenly ruined and has its own routines.¨

I am a quote searcher. While I never mark my books, I carry in my head a sort of serpeant-eye, a third pupil that focuses on, implants in memory quotes from literature and life. I beleive I will recall them always and always. Then, in living life, I forget at once.

What new beauties await? I am on a flight, traveling to Uruguay at the moment. We will land in Buenos Aires and then take a ferry to Colonia del Sacramento--a quiet, maybe quaint town. On Wednesday, when Julie leaves, I will go to Montevideo and fall in love with a new capital, new city, a manifestation of my unspoken (these days written out) urbanity. There are so many ways to write out life here, to lay heavy, sweet, a creamy snapshot (thick, soft, somewhat opaque).

Yesterday, again, I found myself in a trance of walking, winding through the sicamore trees. There were trees everywhere in Mendoza, tall and of a less-than-lucious green. There were fallen leaves that had yellowed in death, their cerulean spirits drained by descent, drought, the footsteps of children and their smallest desires. Almost everything was closed and while this meant, perhaps, that the deepest of the city had faded, I could hear my breadth with every step. The Plaza de Independecia remained full, however, lovers intertwined as always, excitedly shameless, so far from the shadows of the trees. The wooden, marked stalls were mostly empty, but still of bright circus colors: arranged as a cradle around the lovers and the trunks.

I wanted to write but could not settle my feet anywhere. I wanted to run, to flee, to fall forward into the air, to be even on top of a red dust mountain where real fear could drain my everyday, somewhat indulgent fear. I wanted to be at my grandmother´s bedside, above the carpet the color of those disappointing trees, in my Berlin apartment with a line of real crossoints at my fingertips, in a Buenos Aires cafe with this same red pen, but not, not, not in Mendoza. Mendoza: I tried so hard to love, to like, to understand but it left me emptier than fasting, it was itself a sort of fasting of my world.

My only consolation, in those pattering moments, my short clicking heals that with every effort (banging, abandoning, dancing) could not take me home, was the trip that had brought us through: the Andean Cordillera where I tried, even in exhaustion, to keep my eyes wide open, to click them shut for short moments of memorizing. I recalled entering the minibus, rickety and small; the silver-toothed man who sat behind, tried to convert with pamphlets, asked if I was single and poked my shoulder without remorse; the wild-haired Chilean woman all done up in lime green; a young man, almost handsome, alive in cerulean (before the death of trees), who held us up at immigration. What with all the shades of green? I wonder if the Argentines and Chileans try to pull close the towering trees, get at them before they are fallen, marmelade leaves, sucked dry or slick, sick from easy rain; kiss them corpseless, on both sides, taught children all grown up. I thought of the old couple in front of us, the man covering his wife with his jacket, pulling her close; and the Ecuadorian man who gave me a emerald shirt when I shivered in my core, perhaps from cold.

Maybe it is not only places but journeys that mean to me, the hope of somewhere else, even titilating disappointment. And so I will go to Uruguay, a place I know pathetically little of. And then I will speak of it wistfully, my urban amante, sooon to push it aside with other wanderings, but love, love, love it from my same cold core.

I write because I want others to feel, not see or understand, what I experience. I want the words to wash them in real melancholy (a little Mendozan boy dirtied to his elbows, crooked- toothed, not begging but selling stolen valentines); relief (my final descent, this height-fearing girl, from the mountain, holding-a child moment-Rodrigo´s hand so tight that he whimpered); anger; satisfaction; joy; love (it´s all about love...); but most of all, beauty. How else can beauty be felt, pulsed, prickle from afar if not through sentences pondered, poured over and finally penned. It is not news that we live in a world where beauty is unexplicable and suddenly ruined and has its own routines...

Could I then say (I will dare it) that my goal is to grasp that beauty in its fluidity with words, to translate, transcribe before its ruin.

We are landing now and I can iterate with my whole heart outstretched (if murmuring) that I am relieved. I am home enough now, far from those weeping trees that made me too want to weep, the corpoes of their fraudulent flowers not buried or burned but bent into the Mendozan streets. I am home enough in Buenos Aires--afar from those premature skeletons. Such good air it is to breathe, still green but not goblin green, rather alive, alight, of the limelight...the green of birth or better yet, of beauty

Sundays

It is not that I forgot it was Sunday, rather failed to understand (yet again) the weight of the word, the weekly wonder. In other words, the bodega we tried to visit was closed, except for the super expensive restaurant lacking in appropriate protein. I had a glass of Malbec and we returned to Mendoza. It is so quiet (not quaint, exactly).

Independencia?

It is Independence here, or is it Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital, as etched into the street signs. Street signs make me laugh, smile, thunder in my eyes. They are named after countries, capitals, desires (independence? freedom?). Luckily, our street does not properly represent Mendoza. There are sicamore trees; there are sighing clouds; there are wide streets and the livliest of plazas. I want to ride a bicycle. I want to ride a horse. I want to fly high again, like in the mountains of Bariloche, on the broadest horse waist, with tickled thighs.

I miss the wind. It is hot, beating, almost back-breaking sun here. I love the heat, love the heart of it, water beads, slippery stride. I miss my family, bagels, Broadway. There are certainties that I miss.

We searched for Mates and bombillas (pronounced bombishas here). The pharmacy man asked us to stay for Mate but we were searching for tickets to fly east. We sat outside on the square and drank giant juices, and I had a coffee that made me shake like an espresso virgin (which I am certainly not). We have a big, big bathtub, where I could slosh around for hours. I love baths. But I am sick of neon lighting.

Tomorrow is winery day, and I will taste the spiced reds and choose something for my father. Tonight is pasta night 1000. We will go to a sidestreet and have homemade fettucini. Mmmmm.

Word of the Day

According to Julie, the word of the day is Sketchy. We rode a minibus through the Andes, with various problems, having almost lost our luggage and watching bloody, almost-ninga films. Just arrived in Mendoza to a neon-lighted street. We are going to search for dinner, maybe some yummy pasta and red, red wine.

Those were the most beautiful mountains, the colors, red, green, christmas shades strung upon the earth. There were moments in which I had to hold my breadth. There were moments in which I wished I liked, loved climbing mountains.

A Solitary Flavor

In some moments, I feel a certain alive that I have not known for the past months. My tonic is espresso. I am glad I discovered it at last in Berlin and that here in Santiago, I allow it to purse my lips, to settle on the tip of my tongue, to tear at my stomach with certain pride. I love coffee and my love for it is loud, limitless even. What to say of Santiago? Sometimes, I feel I have woken up in my own past, some streets seem the same, some walks wickeder, secrets I had seen unfold in the pungent past, jokes I have played upon myself, my own tickled ears.

We are staying in a neighborhood that defies the city. Its short, cappucino-colored buildings exude unreal charm. I could sit at Emporio Rosa always, gawk at the 100th artisenal helado sign, simply people watch and ignore the waiter with burning brown eyes. I could eat again and again this goat cheese, mozzarella cheese, salted tomato, crusty bred sandwich that makes me moan. I could love in this city, for its poeple that make me feel safe, for I have found those here certain and warm, less slippery than my Argentine acquaintances.

What to write of Santiago when I have seen so little, stared only softly into the concrete cubes of universities and dodged few cars. There are blue bug cars here, the color of my San Telmo bathroom and sad, suckling street art. There are men in professor sweaters that so suit my father, life glimpses, long kisses, mediocre and the best of friends. We are all so sickly similar, drinking water out of jars and crying goodbyes. I admire huddled newborns. I wonder all the same.

I miss Rodrigo in this soft city, how he brought life (and lust) to every discussion, energized, synergized with every companion. I wonder what it would be like to visit him in Chiloe--one of those wonderful wonderings that takes life in my mind, heaving promise only there.

Santiago reminds me of the 1950s, understated, bold and full of houseware stores that would blow Emmas mind. It reminds me of Berlin on its corners but never of Buenos Aires. Julie says it reminds her of Croatia, which makes me wish for seafood, for ports, for the lovers promise I made 2 years ago, to which I now feel witness but not within.

I sit here, overdressed, overtired, watching a newborn boy all blown up in blue and wanting him to be more beautiful. His mother sips her tea, startles his lips with her thumb and sweats under the reappearing sun, which has repaired my image of Santiago.

When I move, I move to a cafe that is stifling and somehow popular, on a center street with a victorian couch. I would perch upon it if it did not already possess a lunchtime owner, a small businessman who is afraid, embarassed or genuinely disinterested in Cafes With Legs. It is here, holding tight to the wooden tablet above my knees, that my guilt--not gone nor forgiven--weighs only lightly on my chest. It is here that I can say aloud: he is not my kind of man. I am relieved by the heat, what lies at the heart of it all. Whether brown haired in New York or indisputably rubia here, I am the same laugher, same girl (woman?) served with the same subtle (sometimes severe) fright of the given up, same narcotic of nostalgia. Ciego, siempre serà tu ayer mañana. (Blind one, it will always be your yesterday tomorrow.) Neruda´s known words are my greatest fear.

But I must not regret (must I not?), or repent, rather realze that I could never write if I did not feel so hard. This, not my pen, but the piercings of my mind, is, was and will be my only lasting relief.

I wonder--a bit backwards--whether I will ever find the certainty to sit still for the months it would take to really write, or whether my fleeting fingers will flee such perfect possibility and land me back in the other life I have chosen.

Here, with broadway music playing as my background, backdrop, with Neruda poems at my damp feet, I am suddenly alone. Neruda wrote in his poem, Sabor, he conservado una tendencia, un sabor solitario. I, too, have conserved a tendency, a solitary flavor, a fixed patent de las semanas muertas, of the dead weeks, del aire encadenado sobre las ciudades, the air condensed above cities, the only places I will ever call home.

Julie has Dorothy slippers, but not ruby ones...rather the boldest of blues. I have my leather Argentine sandles, propertly worn through, with wishful not worm holes, tied too tight around my ankles, ripped. Both of us were up for giving up our pocorn last night, to a man working in our hotel. Both of us love to write and love to love. And both of us, my artist friend and I, in South America, within the inside and outskirts of Oxford, are finding our way.

Volcanos, Avocados, Straw Hats

This is the time I have the most to say, to write and yet it is the time when nothing wants to come out. There are no words, no sentences, paragraphs, pages to encompass the last week. The, um, highlight (that cannot be the right word) was, of course, climbing the volcano. I was terrified. Horrified. Afraid. I do not think that I have ever been so physically scared in my life. Marching up the side of the ice field for 2.5 hours, I shoke, held tight to Rodrigos hand, tried with all of my might to focus solely on his white footprints and place my own feet directly inside of them. What was I thinking??? I am terrfied of heights! I cannot deny the sense of accomplishment I felt, not when reaching the summit, but when my feet were firmly planted back on lower ground. I had faced my fear for the first and last time. That I know for sure.

We arrived in Santiago yesterday, after 11 hours on the bus, where I tried to sleep, read almost all of the Time Travelers Wife (now, that is what love is). We have a bathtub here. Even a little couch. It is warm and I can hear the fire of engines that always brings me home.

We spent a lot of time in a white house, soon to be a hostel, eating avocados, bread, cheese and these incredible tiny oranges, so sour and satisfying in Pucon. There were straw hats all over the wall and scorching hot water, a definitely dirty kitchen and a barbecue. We cooked Easter dinner, Julie and I, and Rodrigo invited us to stay in Chiloe with him. Of course Julie will go home, then to see Kwok in England. I, too, will go home, but there is always this part of me (the runaway part, the part that has picked up in strength and pace this past year) that lights up at such offers, that thinks warmly of daily bike rides and inhabiting a place that is not my own. But the truth is, I will follow me everywhere.

There was so much more in Pucon, so many other things I will not forget, but many of which I cannot bring myself to write out here and now.

I am excited to explore Santiago, to find great coffee (she says, as she sits in an internet cafe drinking nescafe...). I would be lying if I said that cities do not pull more at my heart than even the most beautiful of towns. We rode up along the Andes, I thought about the day with the gauchos, my mind wandered back to Buenos Aires and that felt like a different time, a different me. While I do, in some sense, want to run away from certain realities that I have to deal with, there is also a part of me that misses, more than ever, the warmest of places (not in terms of temperature but emotion), that can be found only in my own country, that continue to define home for me.

End of Winter?

Last night, on the roof of the bar down our street, and then within the bar, we drank fuerte caipirinhas and said goodbye to Phillip, our new Munich friend--who once snuck kittens in his pully (sweater) and was the first to dare the river at night. We then went with Rodrigo, the guide, to another corner restaurant where I had squash gnocchi and raspberry juice. We spoke about Europe and as both Julie and Rodrigo recounted Italian memories, I was seized with a strong desire to go to Tuscany, to see Venice before it sinks. Today we are going to a Mapuche community, to a waterfall and other places which I have already forgotten, after hastily organizing this trip. We will return and rest ourselves for the volcano tomorrow, rise at six when I will be hopeful for a cup of coffee and annoyed at myself for pretending, if only for a moment, a day, a week, that I am not terrified of heights.

Many people talk about conquering their fears: I am not that blind. I do believe, however, that confronting fears somehow frees me, somehow allows me to grow older in the wisest of ways. I am looking forward, mostly, to the summit and the lava and most of all, sliding down, my own bottom my tobogin in the snow. I wish my sister was here: I love her in the strangest, strongest, most innate of ways--different, of course, but in many ways more than I could ever love a lover--the way I expect to love my children, I suppose.

We will likely go to Valdivia and then Santiago (thanks to Julie´s ability to actually organize things), returning through the Andes to Mendoza. I think I will spend my last few days in Cordoba. Given a choice between one of the world´s greatest wonders (the Iguazu falls) and a central city, known for its dashing streets and divenly untouristy atmosphere, I have chosen the latter. Of course, I am a tourist here. But as everyone knows the real heart of me lies in quaint cafes and stone plazas, the reality of humid, siesta-clad life that only Marquez has caught with fantastical fraud. Cordoba should make my heart sigh in the most adolescent of ways.

I know I will then go home and be glad and sad and somewhat lost. I have no purpose here, now, and yet that is the best of things. But will I be able to resettle in the New York City apartment that has so long been my home, solemnly pregnant with memory? Or will those memories, that have followed me here if only in slight, ghostly form, be still in the air, the walls, the end of winter?

Ghost of Wanting

Do you know those moments, the many, when you begin with a destination but cannot stop yourself from walking...when your feet know what your mind (or is it your heart?) really wants to know, needs to know: how to belong.

I cannot belong here the way I belonged in Argentina, with my light brown hair and newly learned buenos. I cannot belong on these blackened brick strees, between the moments, softer somehow than the weeks that have passed.

Nestled between the Viejo Gringo bar and the grounds of the port, single, serene, sadly perfect roses split open periwinkle bushes and mark the end of summer. Boys on bicycles, borrowed or bought, slip by the few cars marking the streets. The volcano should be the perfect backdrop on which to write prose, yet somehow, it is when it is blocked from my view that this city as a certainity, as someone elses only home, breathes bright.

Like at home, little girls in night blue uniform flood the sidewalks. They carry Winnie the Pooh shoulder bags, sometimes pulling bikes behind, like forgotten pets that children acquire and relinquish to their parents in the slowest of time. They hold tight to their bikes, wet with rain or sticky handlebars rubbed raw with fright. This is most definitely a tourist town. It is a place for overnighters to sleep and suck on succulent parillas, men with mountain gear to conquer the truest of all mountains. A volcano dressed in frozen beds, which spits back up with a fire even dragons could fear. All mountains are alive, of course, can shake and shatter, shadow in shock. But this volcano, I know, even from such a distance, is alive in its core, the deadliest of earthly hearts.

I want somehwhere inside of me, one of those unknown places, to scream, cry out in recognition that I am in Chile. But this is much more of a whispering place. Pucon could mark your heart with its wooden crosswalks, tree trunk slivers replanted in the ground. It could draw you in with early sunlight, flat-bellied plazas, an unfilled promise of storm.

If I compared cities to lovers, I would think of Buenos Aires as the most passionate of men: with dark sides, deep sides, both beautiful and disappointing, desirable without cause. San Junin would be a life partner, a soft shoulder of the earth, unmistakable, sure and never shocking. Bariloche, broad and boundless, would fall somewhere in between...its promise of comfort broken by its hardly harsh shell, too beautiful almost. And here, Pucon, would be a boy, a first kiss on the cheek, wet and warm with only a ghost of wanting.

Window in the Skies

I don´t know how to write about last night. I don´t know how to capture in written words the sensations, the softness, the strange innocence alight in it all. There were so many stairs down to the hot springs, I almost slipped a dozen times, or did slip and caught myself right before falling, laughing out my fear. No one who really knows me would be even slightly surprised.

There were no lights down, but Julie was properly equipped with a high-tech headlight from Kwok. I thought a lot about falling, as I always do in high places, as I did on that strong horse in the Bariloche mountains, when the stones shook under its feet. What is it that I am so afraid of? And why is it that I keep wanting to climb mountains (volcanos), to ride high into the horizon and make myself look down. Its the vallies, pampas grass, animals that from afar are leggo-sized and docile, up close warm and wild-eyed (could this be me, too?).

There were 7 hot springs, the first and last with their great heights of steam simply the best. Phillip (the German guy who we met on the bus) and I went to find the other hot springs, walking directly in the wrong direction, finding one shallow, cool pool and a rushing river. Somehow, the cold did not bother me last night.

The guide convinced me to try diving into the river. Climbing over the frigid, round rocks, slipping, catching myself, tiptoeing across a tree trunk laid down as bridge, piercing the surface, screaming, wriggling out of the water, being pulled to my feet by warm hands and feeling suddenly warm all over. With my heart racing, my hair full of ice and the whip of autumn air. Looking out on that river, hugging my knees, a window in the sky.

I don´t love skies, baby blue or of bad-moods. What I love is being above or within, singling out the stars pointing south, clouds that cry out the humidity, the humility too, of our harshest days alive. What I love are horizons, other beginnings and no ends.

I fell asleep on someone´s shoulder on the way home. So safe I felt in that small white van, with the open window winds on my closed eyelids, the dry hum of a radio voice alight with life, washed skin against my cheek, something, somewhere, somehow fully human and whole.

P.S. All Answers Lie in Wine

My favorite Hungarian wrote me that title today :) Perhaps it is true, at least in these pampas, these plains.

I am in Chile, after two long bus rides and a short stop in San Martin de Los Andes. Where to begin? The first bus ride, where both Julie and I became extraordinarily naseous, the salty pumpkin soup we ate last night, the adorable lodge-hosteria with a naked woman statue that was so ornately detailed it was almost real and brown overhead beams and a 1950s green bathroom. The huge, immaculate roses of San Martin. The second bus ride, at 6 AM, towards the volcanos, where I slept, spoke in Spanish, English and German with a sports student from Munich, stopped for crackers, petted kittens, encountered military style border guards all in vibrant green, wiped the cold sweat from the binational window pane, thought of home.

Tonight we are going to the Termas. We will lie in the hot springs and look up at an open sky. Maybe we will see the volcano glow a barbie pink or single stars that I cannot know in Manhattan. I dont know where my sudden desire to climb this volcano has come from, but it is strong and startling, perhaps because lava is not only something rarely thought of but rarely dreamt of, as well. Chile reminds me so much more of Costa Rica than Argentina...it is flat and warm, the buildings low and cool. It has been too short a time to form a real opinion, although a volcano guide is going to have a barbecue for us on Easter (I must note that he asked whether it was on Sunday or Monday). I told him I was sad to be away for Easter, asked if there were any festivities and he seemed more than happy to plan an afternoon affair.

We are in a cabin-like room and overlook a small garden area. There are tiny kittens in the bushes, which I mistook, what with the shaking leaves, for wretched repiles. I was thrilled to see their tiny, chirping faces, striped and striking among the trees.

Greasers, Billy Joel

There is this song by Billy Joel, Vienna, and some of the people closest to me have suggested its relevance to my own experiences in life. Maybe I am burnt out. Maybe I have pushed myself to hard. But my motivation, my passion, seems so subued these days. The only, single thing I crave is to write. I want to write in the moments when the sky is dusty and dusky and the earth is wet beneath my feet. When I feel like I am in Europe, the moments that bring me back to Berlin, to the Paris rain, to the reality that I will be moving to England. I want to write in the moments that I trip on the stony streets, that I shiver in the shadows, that I feel far away from home and the moments when I feel I am somehow, somewhat at home.

There were greasers on the street, with slick leather jackets and slicked-back hair. I never imagined these 1950s creatures would come to life on the tall streets of Bariloche, these creatures I have only seen in Danny and his lightning brothers, in plays and maybe dreams.

The restaurant we ate at last night had trees growing through the ceiling, a vegetarian waitress serving Parilla and an elf door. The elf door has certainly made its mark on my list of favorite things, along with the pampas grass, the cerulean lakes, out of focus mountains, media lunas, cafe dobles, yerba Mate, glass earrings, bueno as an introduction, bright eyes, pink building facades, the idea of red beer, the reality of red wine and siestas.

I am excited to visit the volcano town with hot springs and hikes. I am excited to hear Chilean Spanish and to fall in love, as I know I will, with yet another lugar.

Pasta...penguins?

We went back to Albertos for pasta last night where I ate most of Julies four cheeses without realizing it. Between the small bottle of red wine, tired muscles and the waiters, I felt a bit like I was in a different world. One of the waiters, a married man, really rubs me the wrong way. Julie and I spoke about how you can often tell, at least in part, how and who people are from first encounters. The other waiter, however, the owners son, is a nice man with big brown eyes and a softer persona. Tonight we are going with him to have drinks at a place that we thought was called Weekend, but is someting indecipherably similar or to a dance club oddly called Cerebro (brain). Tomorrow we are planning to head to Chile but we still need to plan out the details of the trip: Chiloe, an archipelago, if there are penguins, and directly to Pucon, with its sleepy volcano, if they have already migrated.

If I were a gaucho...

If I were a guacho I would want to be just like Alicia, with her long side braid and maroon scarf, her wild eyes and even wilder wonder. Yesterday, Julie and I went horsebackriding. There are no words to descibe the beauty that we encountered, from the pristine horses, speckled or white-hooved, to the startling mountains, awash with dust. If I were a guacho, I would spend all of my days startling back these mountains...chasing sheep, developing calluses on my thighs, barbecueing soft slabs of meat and sucking water from the streams.

Julie is a lovely friend. A friend who stands by you when you cry, who stands up for you with more than fists, who will wash the dust out of your clothes and offer you chocolate bears. She is the kind of friend who believes, in both the best, the bad and the worst of moments, in the people that she loves. The best kind of friend.

The pampas grass is the most beautiful golden-brown. It seems so much more alive than the grass in New York City parks, than the Argentine flowers even, the lone buds that sometimes speckle this landscape but fail to impress.

They rounded up our horses yesterday and gave me the biggest of them all. I was evaluating them on the distance I would potentially fall. Luckily, my horse (though large) was quite sturdy and sweet and while I was a bit terrified on the mountain sides covered in stones, I was elated. The hundreds of sheep sprinting through the dust, the sun hot on my back and Alicia, more filled with life than any woman I have ever met. The combination of her spirit and the landscape made me question whether I am really a city girl at heart.

In fact, my heart seems to fall everywhere. In each city, town that I visit, I fall in love. Maybe it is the diversity of the world, or maybe it is how similar each place is to another one I have loved. Whatever it is, Bariloche has found a place in my heart. Some of the most beautiful moments-simply walking through the mountain town, seeing school children in uniforms, entering local eateries, gazing at hill after hill in the near distance, failing to perceive past the lakes, tasting media lunas, large cups of espresso and chocolates formed in the shape of giraffes...

Today we went kayaking, which was also beautiful, though our guide failed to impress in the way that Alicia had. There is something so serene to sitting within the water, though my body craved to dive deep beneath the pale, clear surface, to touch the earth below. Maybe what I need right now is to be much closer to the earth, to the natural places, perfections and imperfections that pervade.

I think one of our best meals was that which we made in our room: cheese, avocados, french bread, wine, chocolates, fresh cookies, raspberry yogurt. The fruit seller is a beautiful man, with those beautiful Argentine eyes that startle as much as the landscape, that are deeper even than the seven lakes of this south. I love food. I also love mountains: I used to think I loved the snow-capped the most, but now it is the dusty red that captures my heart. I could live here, I think. I could have so many lives in so many different places, with so many different beginnings. I love speaking Spanish again, feel it coming back to me in the smallest ways, remembering words, rolling my rs...returning to the first tongue that enchanted me.

I am trying to find peace with myself, within myself. There are so many things that I regret and yet I know now that I can move past them. I know that I will live many wonderful moments, those moments we all know as giving us the most life (like lying in the rain, cuddling a baby, sipping a perfect cup of coffee, crying a happy tear, pushing yourself only slightly beyond your limits). I am glad, these days, that I feel so hard, that I love so hard. Instead of battling the senstivity inside of me, I am trying to allow it to touch every experience, every hour, every taste, movement, part of me.

I don´t know what will happen in the weeks, months, years to come. But for now, maybe, it is enough to know that I will eat ravioli tonight, we will be offered midnight dancing by our waiters and return to Mamushka to build up our chocolate supply-and I will fall asleep in the mountain silence, a friend by my side, if only temporarily at peace with it all.

Elflein

We arrived in Bariloche to a pink, gingerbread house. I ate the best lasanga I have had in years, sipped a glass (couple of glasses) of red wine and wandered the pebbley streets in search of chocolate. After buying a bag of chocolate covered cherries, mint chocolate, marzipan, almond, chocolate squares, circles, dots, branches etc. I bit excitedly into a chocolate covered cherry...little did I pay attention to Julie´s warning of a pit...and broke my molar. Ouch.

So much for the cheeryness of chocolate, or cherries. We walked up into the hilly streets today, in search of an orthodontist-dentist, and then realized that the offices would clearly be closed for the afternoon siesta. I was given directions by a woman working in another chocolate shop, where we feasted on media lunas and other pastries (actually I had a great dulce de leche filled crossoint with hazelnuts, I am taking back my dislike of dulce de leche), a beautiful, fiery woman whose house I am determined to visit while I am here.

Dancing tonight, perhaps, since our waiters last night invited us out to a local dance club. I think we should go, since we have not had that experience yet.

The air is so cool here, but it is quite refreshing. I cant wait for a horseback ride and a parilla on an estancia outside of town. I am re-falling in love with the Spanish language. Ok, off to plan some lake adventures/take photographs/wander.

My favorite street name so far in all of Argentina is here: Elflein.