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.