Letters to the Cities I love. Part 2.

Buenos Aires. My City of Good Air, my City of Fire.

You were my home away from home, my first experience of living abroad. You are the reason I’m almost irrevocably and perpetually in love with autumn and why I’ll always have a chuckle hiding when I roll my rrs and say perfecto.
You taught me, tenderly, to learn the intersections and not the roads, and you watched with wide eyes when I ran like an ass and crossed the streets.

You taught me what it was like to learn a new language, to live with a vocabulary of 20 words, but how not to be limited to them.
From day one, I felt strangely protective about you, like I could save you from all that was coming your way, not knowing that it was you that was guarding me all along.

From all the sunsets in your plazas, and watching the trees go by in Tren de la Costa, I think I left my heart at one of the stations. Possibly Anchorena. Possibly in the train itself. Or possibly in the steps of Serrano while watching the couple dance tango.

No, it has to be the sunsets. Sunsets fragrant with coffee and sea. With a slight undertone of fernet, of course. Could you and I ever do without it? I miss you like crazy, I know there is so much more we still have to talk about, spend evenings sharing a maté, nights discussing all that we have seen.

I started reading Borges recently, and realized how subtly captivating you have always been, how no one has ever be immune to the absolute magic you are. No wonder he found in your streets “the point in space that contains everything else.”

It’s almost a trap that a person willingly walks into, a formidable lover to take, and we wear you like a second skin, familiar and home yet always with a secret or two tucked under a corner.

It’s been almost two years now and I know I’ll come back — I don’t know when or how but that I will.

It’s a curse, you know, to fall in love with cities as much as I do. Missing them is nothing like missing a person, it’s so much more complete, you can feel it growing like a vine on you, encompassing all that you could ever feel. The smell, the taste, how the streets felt under your feet, you miss the cobblestones feverish with the afternoon night, you long for the nights drunk on tango.
And missing no city gives me as much joy, as does you, mi Ciudade de Fury.

Until then, mi amor. Until then.

Thanks for reading! This is the first part of a series of letters I am writing to the cities that have touched me, cities that I love with as much heart I can muster.
Feel free to check back for more!
Buena Onda. :)