Lunes 11 Septiembre, Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina
It's been a cold streak with a stop in the middle of it, silencing buses by virtue of the guild's voice one cold morning in Buenos Aires, surprising so many of us, all of a sudden endless bureaucratic lines and my name had nowhere to live and without a home to respond to how far does a name really go and calling back does so little good and maybe they'll write me at a different address, a name again, but what good is a name that leaves blanks, doesn't have any shadows here to be? Bus terminals are simple spaces but exhausting- airports are energizing interstitial places, you can't leave them once you're in them or, rather, you are always leaving from different doors, in different places, arriving anew time and again, even returning you never turn down quite the same corners. Bus terminals are never that, never terminal, pretending really never more than pretending a sense- of security, of dislocation, of moving along somewhere, of orderliness- of wheels more than anything, I think, but wheels stuck to the same ground, always anew the same ground. A strange transit, a transition, but always alighting anew in a territory as old as it was the last time you came by, I guess. I can't say. I've never been here before, and I'm not really here at all- remember, I'm all light, all empty spaces reflected in an elevator somewhere, without the slightest base pretensions.
Up the road by a river I settled in again, maybe the only stranger staying around as long as I am- an interruption? Everything is always fine, I keep saying, but I think they're just asking because they're not really sure what else to ask me, speaking the same language but I just don't sound quite right, muttering a different way than they are- same language, different grumbles from some other home that I could never go back to, anyway, even though I'm lingering overlong in this one, slowly erecting itself in the scent of paint meant to cover the frames someone who hasn't arrived will sleep in as they're leaving. Even the names here aren't really here, where there's no minus one, just a bodega at the bottom of the stairs, behind the iron lift, full with all of the alcohol you can't bring in, because it's always already around and we all seem to be speaking some language other than the one from here, settling into this one, for now, guessing at it as it lets out all the secrets of our being afoot where it's not so hostile- just a letter or so away. River runs long and lingering through the city where that guy was born, you know the one, he kinda just went by guy and a name again only a letter or two away from hostilities and this time, it was all in name, that's to be believed this time, because that name and everything in it seemed to be what he took with him up the river, over and over again between rivers with a saintly faith in some man to come, destined to arrive a new by the river run wide down which I will, soon enough, literally roll, until we all let out into the sea.