Na Trioblóidí

Day 131 - Buenos Aires

I think I finally put my finger on it in Buenos Aires. An explanation for a malaise grown over recent weeks that niggled and pricked my waking hours. I thought I could shake it, I just needed a bit more sleep. But it was emotional lethargy that saw days pass in this coolest of capitals without the slightest endeavour to sample its 'je ne sais quoi'. There were broad boulevards, architecture redolent of Paris and beautiful public spaces but somehow the city lacked something. It was I that lacked something though I realised. It suddenly struck me that we all form a connection to the place in which we live. We invest something in our home and it in turn invests something in us. The wandering alien severs his connection and loses a certain sense of belonging. I had no door to shut the world behind, no space to claim as my own. I was caught in a river whose course was unknown but whose current was insistent. Despite the new-found clarity and understanding I stood, or rather lay, surprised at this revelation. I hadn't anticipated a form of homesickness and certainly not so soon. It seems the wider world had taught me something about myself, fancy.
The hourglass didn't cease though even as my activity did. Every hour another grain of sand. 17 days left, 3000 miles to Bogota. I couldn't hang around the hostel all day plaguing Leon with music requests and bothering Cecilia with psychoanalysis. Make hay. So I ate fantastic steaks and monotone pizzas. I saw the tombs of San Martín and Eva Peron. Perused quirky antiques and drank endlessly flat beer. And edged inexorably towards a reckoning. A violent putsch and a nearly punch. Spite laden eyes narrow and black. Desperate remonstration fought chilling logic. A sudden crossroads without traffic lights or speed limits. The great unraveling or an inevitable check? Absolute or absolution? Reality swirled like a stirred cappuccino. It melted like the persistence of memory. Simple streaks of variance contorted into gaping, fanged mouths poised to devour us whole.  Gravity slipped Newton's leash and quadrangles twisted like a Rubik's cube. A volcano had erupted and I knew not how long its ash would cover the sky. I followed a faint light in the gloom, it pulsed, it flickered, it dimmed beyond sight at times but I followed. What else could I do?