Move

I left Ushuaia last week on a bus that carried me two days across thawing Patagonia. Green creeping up the Andes, the roads muddy and rutted. In the sky, predator birds circle, waiting for small rodents to stray from their holes.

In Buenos Aires it is already late spring. It is traffic like a bar fight, miniskirts and high heels, the sun screaming down on suits and cellphone calls like machine gun fire, sidewalk cafes walls of conversation.

I rented a small flat in Palermo, in a tall building with a west-facing balcony. You would love the watery light that thickens the air just before sunset. In the mornings I wake up to taxi drivers lying on their horns and a bakery so potent I can smell it from eight stories above. I read a lot. In the mornings, I drink small coffees so thick that sugar sits in a pile on top of a layer of tan foam. An old man waits the tables here, and we are becoming friends.

I spend my afternoons in la Librería de Ávila. The books here, like me, like you, are ordered loosely by whatever system’s handy. Subject, genre, time-period. But there is some order, if you look for it, and there is the calm of dusty shelves. They are stacked as haphazardly as the buildings of the city, like a Tetris game gone awry, and each day I leave with a small volume which I put on the nearly empty shelf in my new living room.

The city, the café, the bookstore: these things grow in me like the spring—carefully, in search of the sun.