La Nuit Blanche

Cafe Tortoni, Buenos Aires, taken by your’s truly.

There are many things I should be doing at this moment… Work on a couple of websites, several shoots are in line for post-production before I get back to New York, study my castellano before my next class, go shopping for shoes, gifts, see new friends, explore the cafes, eat helados, take pictures, dance. Anyone in their right mind would be bursting into flames with feverish activity, on the last leg of a trip to a fascinating country. As it has been for me, these past three weeks.

It had seemed there was no discernable end to the fierce sunshine and cool warmth of this summery winter, over here. It is freezing here now, wet and clammy. He took away the heat with him, the night he flew back home. I had started to miss him even before he started packing, when he was burying his nose and lips into the cusp of my neck, and I, my arms around his waist inside his jacket, during our night together in Colonia. We’ll be together again in a couple of weeks, but nevertheless, perhaps what saddened me so much about our temporary parting, was that our first trip together was already coming to an end.

The fact that I still have 12 more days here to myself is a delicious thought. But instead, today, I am sitting here by the heater, listening to the rain outside the window of my lover’s flat in Buenos Aires, surrounded by his books, my wrists on his desk, this lazy, gray, cold winter afternoon, feeling his absence, itself a sort of intimate presence.

There is an art to doing nothing. Perhaps I needed this one solitary day to myself to have this city seep into my sentience, slowly. To gather these past 25 days into the folds of my being, to sew its mysterious stars into the map of my consciousness. I want to orient myself in relation to this place.

You know how a place translates you? How when you move in a place unfamiliar to you, the air in your lungs carries a new weight, and the fragrance enveloping you leaves you in slight confusion, and the light carves new land into language you can’t hold, and the clothes you brought with you from that other place start to chafe in odd places?

You know how it feels to be a stranger? To have no idea how to see fields and flatlands, the landscape of a living, dying civilization, domed sky, histories made and believed, here, where I stand? You know what traces of itself this city has erased, hidden, gnawed off? How you constantly strain to grasp the elusive essence of a place with which you are falling in love?

How voices in the hallway surprise you with their melodies, like animated strains of jazz you know you’ve heard before? How footsteps echo and strange keys turn in strange buildings built by the hands hearts minds of a different people, in a wholly unexpected way that surprises you, reawakens you?

Is this how inspiration impregnates you, that beautiful promise of yet another rebirth?

This silence is soothing. I feel an anticipation rising inside me, for the night to begin.

Tonight, Cachirulo, and then La Viruta till dawn.