On election night we ate donuts and popcorn and pizza for dinner.
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In my dream I was so angry.
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We went to the store to buy more popcorn, and told our grocer and friend we’re leaving the US on New Year’s Eve.
From “La clandestina,” a letter sent out to paying subscribers on November 15, 2024
Just a couple weeks before, I’d told old professors I saw at a book launch that I’d decided to stay in Denver for the time being, as I’d told you, here, back in the summer. Your summer.
El Pais published an interview-review of La Solicitante in November. A lot of you subscribed to The Missing Person from Spain in the following weeks. I wanted to tell you I was about to leave the Anglophone world for the Southern Cone, that your subscriptions, comments, and reviews meant more than you knew, to thank Maria Ovelar and Luis Bravo Llega for their words in El Pais and Nuebo. But we only had six weeks to pack our entire life in a couple of suitcases.
[…]
Some time later
I walk through Buenos Aires with a pocket-sized notebook in my fanny pack.
When tired I sit at a cafe and order a cup of coffee or fries so I can open my notebook and study my annotated transcript of “Borges & Yo” in Spanish.
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I dream of writing in Spanish but for the last couple of days all I can hear is violence.
Fascism is taunting me in three languages now.
This crowd helped.
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I have to make a living somehow. Practice my profession, communicate that thing that appears to me now and then, for a very important reason I can’t recall at the moment. I’m sure it’ll come back to me.
This conversation is writing, a friend said the other day after I confessed, likely unprompted, that I hadn’t been writing. Yes, I said, smiling. It was so hot that night in Buenos Aires that about 10 minutes later; I fainted.
My friend and her friends, all poets, took me somewhere quiet, put salt under my tongue, held my legs up, and told me about all the times they took care of each other after one of them passed out during heatwaves in the last decade.
That was about two weeks ago. Since then, we moved to another temporary apartment.
The weather’s been great. But the longest we left this place was for a Go meet-up we found online. We walked there in the rain and back. It was worth it.
Hi! You’re reading an excerpt. I clip most public posts a couple of weeks after sending out my letters. Opt-in to receive my posts as emails & you can keep them forever.
I’ve been on the phone a lot. Since last Friday I called three friends who all happen to be immigrant women living in a different country. One moved to the US before I did, one to Berlin around the same time as me, and one to Spain about two years ago. They’ve never met.
None of them are necessarily attached to the country they live in. They’re all on visas and think they might as well stick around. One of them says it wouldn’t be the end of the world if she had to move back to Turkey, the other one couldn’t think of going back, the other isn’t interested in returning to her home country at all but might want to move to another city. One of them visited Buenos Aires once before and didn’t exactly love it. But maybe I can convince the other two to move here. Except I don’t know how long I’ll stay here.
Congratulations on your marriage, and thank you for writing. I'm sending so much love to you!
Thanks for sharing what you’re thinking, love ❤️