Entering Dénouement

This guy wants to go home.

16 days to go in Buenos Aires, and they are limping to finality.  With Jess's friend Purdy here from Minneapolis, Valentine's Day weekend served as a kind of climactic event: train ride to Tigre, a big asado with the roommates, touristy trips around La Boca and San Telmo.  We ate enough Argentine beef to last us ten years and drank enough Quilmes to drown an orca.  With the Tigre trip and the other tourist activities, we crossed the last things off our To-Do In Buenos Aires List.  Now there's nothing left except wait, write, worry, and read.

The more I tell myself to sit back in the sun and enjoy it, the more I want to go home.  Even the smallest thing has us muttering fuck this town again, like in those first weeks.  Everything is cyclical, and we're back at the beginning.  Minutes ago, Jess got ripped off at the Coto supermarket, paid 15 pesos for tuna that should have cost 5.  She tried to show the cashier that the price on the shelf was $2.50 if you buy 2, but the cashier shrugged and said something to the passing manager in Spanish.  As we left, the security guard stopped Jess to check her tuna purchase, to see if she'd stolen the canned fish that she'd actually paid 3 times too much for.  She cried on the way back to the apartment.  When you're this ready to go home, even a can of tuna can break you. 

The smallest hiccups feel like a conspiracy.  Annoyances get aggravated into apocalypses.  I can't take another smattering of dog shit on the sidewalk or rip-off at a grocery store or roommates leaving clumps of food in the kitchen sink.  I'm done.

16 days left.  Too much time to waste torturing myself with my existential crises, the hypothetical plotting of uncertain future, and too much distance from wherever that future will play out to do anything about it.  Maybe I'll write a fucking story.  What else do I have to do.