Indoor explorations,

vicarious adventures:

گل

دلم برات تنگ شده

Which way to La Plata?

One year ago:


I'm glad you're glad we can never leave La Plata, the atemporal restaurants swinging with air and mosque-lamps and Icelandic music, the men washing windows without scaffolding and without falling. Sharing sandwiches even though you liked yours better and I liked mine better, and we had to wait what seemed like hours for the both of them-- so long, in fact, that we switched languages twice and moods how many more times. Maybe you're my father after all, the kind daughters listen to, maybe you were born one day earlier or later or years apart, but none of that matters anyway because today we're in La Plata, and once you're there you can never leave.

The robotic waiter had a soul after all, and so did our conversation. Which is why I'm terrified to drink tea, because of your prophetic statement that it would put an end to everything, to La Plata, even though this place could last forever, I would be swept away into waiting in lines and five-minute falafel sandwiches.

It seems completely natural that in the middle of the humid night, thrashing in my sheets, I was ready to die because I knew I would never realize if I did; that this morning I woke up with a strange fever that made me decide to have two teas instead of coffee, making it hard for my eyes to focus on anything at all. Somehow my mind seemed sharper for this non-grasping, above lines and forward thoughts. Circles, circles, circles today in La Plata, and Paris, and New York and room 815, windowless and therefore outside time. So why count down the minutes, if you only exist inside them? Why not drink glasses of water, or water in glasses, or nothing at all, anything but tea because who wants to walk on the ground anyway?