porteña

four years ago today, i arrived at ezeiza airport in buenos aires. why? because i had to. i had to leave london with a man who wanted me to start a new life together in buenos aires. we had lived together for three months in north london before i eventually said “ok” to his righteous plan: he sounded, at least to me, confident enough to realise it. i quit all of my writing jobs and we moved out of our flat. but, why buenos aires? i don’t know. he was just a dreamer and i was such a fool. argentina was entirely romanticised by his penchant for runaway dramas. he was actually on the run. soon after our porteño life began, i saw an imminent catastrophe coming our way. but yet, i was determined to love the city before my inevitable leaving, surely, alone.
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in buenos aires, located in the south hemisphere, leaves started turning yellow and brown everywhere in may. everything looked awash with nostalgia, sentiment or sometimes melancholy. i was sad because i had absolutely nothing to do. i had no deadlines to hit, we had people do dishes, laundry and clean the room. so, around noon, before the time when mr dreamer would come back from a local café, i would leave our apartment hotel in barrio norte for a walk to be on my own. i would stroll up to recoleta or down to puerto madero…i was like belinda of “follow me (aka the public eye)”, an old film starring mia farrow. but the one without being following by cristoforou, the praivate ditective. i wandered aimlessly day after day. was it aimless? no, it was not. i wandered lonely as a cloud to love the city. and in truth, i was growing to love buenos aires.