So I am now set off to book our seats for one of the performances in October or November, as fall here once again signals the beginning of a working year. Before then there will be Buenos Aires, her own Portland earlier on and Seattle for my birthday. However, there is that specific image that I keep replaying on my mind, her hand on mine, enthralled in the story of Cio Cio San’s love belittled by Pinkerton’s «butterfly« desire. It is that vision alone that gives the wait its meaning. And I have waited for you. And I will wait for you as long as it takes you to trust the love I bring, knowing that you may be Pinkerton to my hope, but you may also stand up to it like the woman I think you are.

Regardless of outcomes, life, or potentially thwarted plans, Butterfly’s final scene will remain with me, like the first time I listened to the opera, which I have never had the opportunity of seeing live yet. The final aria, Con onor muore is Butterfly’s goodbye to her son as she puts an end to her life in search of the honor she failed to have when she was alive, according to her own traditions.

I, for all life is worth, will prefer to live with honor, with the truthfulness of a word that does not falter, a love that remains and gives, and the belief in the you I know, rather than the dim hope of your memory.

Because of Alex, Houston was flooded today. It happened much in the same way as it does in Buenos Aires when it rains heavily. Here the rain amounted to 6 inches or more, and it went on for a full two days, more heavily today.

I went to work, but was wise enough to return home before the rush hour began. Part of that was my need to pick up the dog from his grooming appointment, which he hates. So at some point we found ourselves in the car talking to the woman I still love and eating a sandwich a few blocks away from the apartment. It was good to get home earlier, as recommendations on the TV by the time we arrived were to stay wherever you were and wait it out.

So Houston treated me to its bad weather reputation today and, interestingly, it was not much different from some things I have already seen: cars stuck with water almost reaching the roof, people wading through heavy rain oblivious to whatever lies underneath their knees, well-buried in the water.

By the way, a difference is indeed that the Mayor spoke on the radio and she was later on TV, but at no point was her administration questioned on account of a storm, which is a weather phenomenon and not a capricious human decision. I could not but feel this was a more pragmatic society than mine, which expects her to do her job without blaming her for absolutely everything, such as the weather or World War I.

I personally cannot defend any single Mayor of BA I have experienced in my several years of life there. They have all at some point or another failed me or others. However, I have always been kind of alone defending the point that, if it rains heavily and the city floods, it is not totally a person’s fault…it is the weather. There are no subsidies on offer here for those who got their cars stuck in the water, or whose shops got flooded. You knew that it would happen when a heavy storm came, so you are on your own if Houston’s climate does not suit you.

This is America, right or wrong. This time, scary as it may seem, I have the feeling it is right.

It is only for the past couple of days that I have owned a rather pricey but charming desk with a banker’s lamp that I always craved and never quite indulged in. In Woolfian terms, I have only now secured a “room of my own”. So I might as well use it…although I must confess the couch and small Ikea table I got for myself simultaneously in May are tempting enough to write on. Parts of this place that I now start to recognize as my home are coming to life, designed by me and my taste (or lack of). It is a major step towards the overcoming my own homelessness, the snail’s shell inside of which I am finally free at my pace and with my choice.

Yet all of this housing independence — minus ownership — is happening while someone is by my side, albeit still quite physically removed to make anything simple. Perhaps that is the most obvious and challenging side of my freedom, the planning on my own while I know that we both might plan otherwise one day. I know the time for togetherness will come, and it will be the way it is meant to be. For now, my own time is this, set on Houston rhythm, with large roaches that hang on trees (like they did in Buenos Aires), with hot mornings filled with sunlight entering the kitchen, with her sleepy voice at the other end of the line when we can speak, with me retreating into myself for now, going without much thinking of the future, as if I was taking this for granted. It is not, or it may not be, but she and the space she gives me makes it all feel like home.

None of these things happened while I stopped writing. The earth continued to revolve around the sun and everything leads me to expect a 365-day calendar filled with achievements and further questions on December 31st. Nothing changed and everything did. I am no longer on Argentine soil, and a part of me begins to feel the severance, that even cut that I decided was the necessary step toward the new phase of my journey.

I now live in a garage apartment that in the next few months seems more inclined to harbor the scorching Houston summer in the day, so I can enjoy its stuffy walls at night despite the air conditioning… I have got a couch, which she helped me assemble after my first foray into the iconic IKEA chain. I have a rack to hang my clothes upon, but it fails to do the job so a walk-in closet is now in the making…with a challenge – shapes in a garage apartment would defy the most versatile designer. I still don’t have a desk, but the couch and a small laptop table do the job of letting me churn out basic work. I still sleep on an airbed, but even that becomes a regal bed when she is around.

Last Wednesday she was arriving. The morning found me working from home before I drove my car to pick her up at the airport. There was the regular attente at Terminal C, the minutes that became hours as the escalators gave me small misleading clues of a potential arm resting on the side, the rim of a patterned skirt that could be hiding her beautiful legs, the shoes that would reveal Gothic-painted toenails. It would be a while before she actually found me…but she eventually did. As I stabilized my senses before the myriad of sensations she triggered, I looked into her eyes as she came close, unsure of where the kiss would fall. It is always on the lips, but I like to mislead her and she likes to pretend she does not expect it. And after that moment in which my thirst finds its relief,  I am whole again, unique in my connection with her blue eyes. Her touch will guide me out the automated doors, and I’ll think I know where I’ve parked my car…but I won’t. Yes, I know, at some point I’ll find it…because that is part of the magic, and just like us, it is meant to be.

Of course I have not expanded on the Kafkaesque developments that today brought me almost to the brink of despair (exasperation by now is a given for me in this country), and I will not unless you have serious insomnia issues, in which case you can send me an email and I will gladly walk you through the process of not finding things here even when everybody tells you they have them – oh, well, there I go again trying to explain…I apologize.

The fact that I have not expanded on my tribulations does not mean they are not potentially clear to you, or at least imaginable, by now. So let me focus on the feelings instead, the depth of the impotence, the rage, the worn-out patience, the repetition and, eventually, oblivion…I know in the not-so-faraway future I will remember the gist of everything that is going on around me now, but I will forget the reason. Just because that is what life is all about, and sooner or later we all forget.

Prometheus

THERE ARE four legends concerning Prometheus:

According to the first he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed.

According to the second Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.

According to the third his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years, forgotten by the gods, the eagles, forgotten by himself.

According to the fourth everyone grew weary of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily.

There remained the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of a substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable.