shopping list

My friend is going to Buenos Aires and asks if I have a shopping list. Yes, I tell him but nothing you can bring back.

I want to smell autumn on the strange trees that grow there, taste the stollen from my favorite bakery, hear the traffic outside the window early in the morning and the lovely round sound of Spanish on an Argentine tongue. I want to feel the water close by in the texture of the air, see familiar faces on the street going in the same direction as I am-to class or a milonga at 2am.

I want to be in a place where people still know how to make things and fix things and creation is considered everyone's job and comes as naturally as breathing. I want to take two hour lunches and naps so I can dance till the wee hours. I want to know the man I buy my bread from and the girl that does my laundry.

I want to live in a house like an old movie starlet, glamorous, full of memories and gently decaying. A place with a key in a shape my grandmother would remember, questionable plumbing, marble floors and an orchid growing out of a crack on the facade like a beauty mark on her ancient face. Can you bring that back??

An Argentine exile without an Argentine passport.