“Wait, wait—you’re moving to Cambodia?!”
I nod. “I was just out there for a few months earlier this year. And now I’m headed back.”
“Ah. So,” leans in, a hushed voice, “did you meet someone?”
I feel my neck snap and eyes pinch. “What?”
A knowing smile: “What’s his name?”
I pause, furl my brow in that way I know is giving me wrinkles. Move to the other side of the world for a dude? It was a motivation that hadn’t even occurred to me.
I shake my head and finally say, “Phnom Penh. His name is Phnom Penh.”
**
Buenos Aires was thin and hip and beat-up. He had that early-sobriety look—a flush coming back to his checks but still a kind of dirtiness, a ruggedness, you couldn’t wash away.
It was 2005 and he’d been pretty well ravaged and you could totally still see that—his walls were covered with graffiti, his storefronts boarded, his arms bore the scars of old track marks we both tried to pretend weren’t there.
I met Buenos Aires at an art opening—you know, one of those underground galleries with lots of piss and broken glass on the sidewalk out front. He had this weird rattail-ish haircut that seemed like it might be hip, in some other context I wasn’t familiar with. He had emo jeans and a kind of dark, grinning sullenness about him—when he smiled his eyes snapped and his laugh was like a crack of lightning.
I liked him immediately. I mean, I was enamored. What can I say?—I was young, and out there in the world for the first time and here comes this dude with crumbling facades and an addict’s swagger and that barely-buried desperation I’ve always found irresistible in a guy. I was in love.
I was in love the way a teenager is in love—I fell and fell hard and didn’t think there was a goddamn world outside of Buenos Aires. We only spent 10 days together: smoking on cold sidewalks, riding the metro when all the sudden he’d bust out in this crazy guerilla-style performance art shit that I couldn’t understand because he’d talk too fast and, besides, Argentinian Spanish doesn’t make any sense to me anyway. But I’d laugh and duck out the doors at the station with him, all wrapped up in the excitement of it, even though I didn’t know what “it” was.
He was beautiful, you know, and vibrant and alive, but you knew he was troubled too. I met his mom once—saw her, really, across a busy street, in the Plaza de Mayo, a short woman wearing a blue scarf, walking briskly into a wind that felt like death.
[...] the plan is that we publish one piece a week. This week was my turn. In “Cities Like Boys” I further the theme I touched upon in a blog post I wrote a few months back—how more and [...]
Love this! Clever and well-written. There should definitely be more travel writing like this.
Such a great piece.
It got me thinking on why I didn’t fall in love with some of the cities that i went to while my friends were completely head over heels with him. Thanks for sharing