I am going to Poets House. No apostrophe. The space between the t and the s is worth a story. Maybe even a national debate on what can and can’t be owned.
— Robert HirschfieldThought Catalog published some of my notes on having a baby.
I think sometimes all ppl want is to be able to tell their stories, over and over.
Today we went to the embassy for Micael’s passport.
The guy at window 14 asked me why I was in Argentina.
Why are you in a place?
How can you ever answer that?
You can say because of this or that.
Because of a girl, a job, because you’re going to school, because this is where you’re from.
But none of it is really true, is it?
Aren’t you there because you’re there?
What right does anyone have to ask you “why are you here?”
Not out of interest or to establish some kind of connection, but as an interrogation, questioning in order to catalog or register you.
The only response seems like “why are you here?”
The agent wanted me to hacer el boludo¹, to say something non-offensive, non-threatening, something that had to do with work, or whatever else would make it easy to catalog me as just another privileged American moron.
I told him “I’m a travel writer.”
On the way to the embassy, in a taxi going down 9 de Julio, I thought for a second I saw a condor.
I knew it couldn’t be, that it was a hawk (a carancho) of some kind.
But what matters is that for a second I could “see” condors in Buenos Aires.
Like someday it could happen, they could fly over 9 de Julio after it’s all melted back into to whatever it will become.
If anyone were left then, do you think they’d ask the condors why they were there?
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¹ – to act like a typical moron
Kelly and Shea were at the terminal de bus.
We greeted each other Argentine style¹, a reflex.
I thought later how we were American men kissing each other, but that we’d all been down here so long it was like none of us was fully ‘American’ anymore.
Is anybody ‘fully’ anything?
There was a somber onda there standing by the buses.
The season was over.
Kelly and I had led kids down the river a couple days earlier.
Now he and Shea would be heading back to North America to guide rafts.
Layla couldn’t get comfortable on the bus.
I tried making up a story about a fish called ‘gaman.’
Halfway to Foyel the gears started slipping, then worked again.
In the bus terminal in Bariloche I held Layla above the toilet.
An old man ripped off a paper towel for us while we were washing our hands.
Outside the terminal were two American kids about to fly-fish the Limay rivermouth.
I had the biggest bags of anyone on the local 72 to the aeorpuerto.
When we got to the airport I appreciated the automatic bathroom sinks.
Inside an office marked “swissport,” two middleaged men and one woman were processing our boarding passes without, apparently, a computer.
Mami bought Layla a white lamb doll from the gift shop.
In the cafeteria we ate french fries 2-3 at a time.
I help Mica with one hand while drinking coffee.
After lunch he was fussy, needed walking.
Two Argentine ladies complimented him on his peinado. ²
The monitors showed “Delayed / Demorrado,” then switched to 5:20, more than two hours away.
Back at the table, Lau and Layla were drawing creatures.
On the other side of the glass it looked windy.
We bought an alfajor to go, went for a walk.
Three American men wearing camo were checking their shotguns as baggage.
Outside, a taxi driver and airport clerk kicked a soccer ball on new-looking pavement.
One wore a sweater vest and button down shirt, didn’t seem to worry about getting dirty.
In the wind and sun I felt less tired.
I looked at the ridgelines above the steppe, wondered what names people used to call them.
A windbreak of ponderosas made white noise.
I saw an oddly camouflaged color entangled in the fenceline trash, realized it was a hawk feather.
A policeman walked down the embankment where we sat and asked for my identification, what I was doing, what I was writing.
I held up these notes and said ‘poemas mias.’
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¹ a single kiss on the right cheek, more just leaning in cheek to cheek than actually pressing lips against person’s cheek.
² haircut