I’ve been in Buenos Aires for close to a week now and have quickly become smitten with this city.
Buenos Aires is a beautiful, lively, and peculiar city. The buses follow no schedule. Wine is often cheaper than fruit. The people are warm and everything and everyone moves more slowly. Somehow the right music is always playing in the background depending on where you are.
Nothing is convenient and there seems to be no desire for convenience. It’s often dirty, nonsensical, and complex, and so it has a soul.
Maybe this will change the longer that I am here, but I do not miss convenience. I do not miss the gridded and sterile roads. I do not miss that sense of rushing to nowhere, of being late to or behind on a thing of no importance.
It seems that anything that moves the heart is destined to trouble it as well. If it does not trouble you, it does not need your time or attention. The less time you invest in it, the less deeply you come to love it.
A city is like a person in many ways. There are the things that make it iconic, the best faces it wants you to see. But if it is to stir something within you, it must be vulnerable to you, and you to it. If the love between you is to deepen, then your hearts must be open immediately, while your acquaintance with each other unfolds slowly.
You will learn what makes the other smile and laugh. You will learn each other’s tastes, how you each choose to decorate yourselves. You will learn the patterns of each other’s movements as much as your speech. You will learn which stories you repeat, which memories you get stuck on.
You will see each other hungover. You will see each other distressed. You will see each other happy and in tears. You will know that the other has been heartbroken, disappointed, and betrayed. Your potential will live in the shadow of that historic pain. And you will learn of the scars that have overcompensated for past injuries. You will learn where the chasms are that limit your mutual understanding. You will know where the other does not want to build bridges. But you will want to build bridges, because for all your own insecurities, for all your fears of coming off too strongly, or not enough, you want this to be more than a passing interest.
You want this to be a friendship that supersedes romance.
