I remember the airport in January. For the first time, Dad didn’t come inside. He dropped me off at the curb and I shouldered my purple backpacker’s backpack and thought how strange it was, when I met Lauren at security, that we had never met before and were about to travel together. We ran into my neighbor at the food court. He gave me leftover Argentine pesos and told me it was an amazing fucking circus down there, had to be seen and experienced to be believed.
I remember the flight, the slight fear, Lauren’s life story and wondering where I was going, exactly, when we switched hemispheres.
I remember the Buenos Aires airport in the morning, bustle and sunshine and women selling perfume. We were just two in a boisterous line of kids with big backpacks, a parade of youth, a line of eagerly anticipated adventure.
I remember the cab ride in, the city materializing into slums and then skyscrapers and then Peru y Estados Unidos 866, a building sky blue and squat with a balcony and a courtyard.
I remember the cab ride out in April and it all looking different. The cab driver asked if I were going to study abroad in the U.S. “Sos argentina, no?” he asked. I like to believe he was being sincere, because all that dancing, all that mate' and que lindooo had seeped into my blood.
I remember on the plane ride home, I pretended I was Argentine, and refused to speak English, because no one says in English, que tus dias pasen hermosos, may your days pass beautifully.
I remember beauty of a tingly, sharp sort. Everyone says Buenos Aires is like a European city, but at dusk mystery made itself magic in street names like Mompox, Sarmiento, Teguchigalpa.
I remember trying to read Borges and not really liking it. But still all those streets with indigenous names, the only way I could describe their mystery was to say “it’s like Borges.” Labyrinths and jungles, no need for bug spray.
I remember we all started writing. All four of us had journals. Amos’s entries, the ones he read out loud, were the funniest, but I have a feeling most of them pulled at all the edges of his high school assumptions and thoughts. I think all that writing was a self-conscious effort—all of us looking for something, teetering on the edge of something, about to precipitate into something that might have been ourselves.
I remember the feeling I had the first time I walked around the city by myself—and all of a sudden I want to go back to those concrete blocks by MALBA, graffittied walls and the sun on my shoulders.
I remember the order of our playlists. We listened to a lot of GirlTalk in our apartment, but it's "Is This Love" and "I Shot the Sheriff" that sound most like the smell of the A/C, the stark sun outside, the meals of crackers and dulce de leche. The tubs of it—on our faces, on the computer, gone in a day.
I remember the day Lauren and Bo were out. Amos and I went to the covered market in San Telmo, duraznos and zanahoria and a million new words for me, to be weighed and carried home blue plastic bags. We were so happy when we thought we had made friends with the vegetable guy.
I remember we tasted chili peppers and spit them into garbage cans and our laughter had heat. When we got back, we chopped vegetables in that tiny kitchen and it seemed there was less space than before.
I remember the way the careful, quiet way he chopped cilantro.
I remember things that never happened. We kissed that afternoon while Lauren and Bo were out and then kept making guacamole and sangria and laughed secretly when they returned. Then what really happened was we danced, in April, returning to that moment when nothing actually happened, and wondering if maybe it did.
CVP
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