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?