Katia

Buenos Aires, Argentina - Circa 1987
Living in Brazil as a tourist required I leave the country every six and three months, not for very long, in about 48 hours I usually got my passport stamped and then I was welcome to enter the samba nation once more. This constant traveling allowed me to become more than familiar with Sao Paulo, Montevideo, Foz do Iguazu, Ciudad Stroessner and other South American cities. On this occasion my Mom and my step dad decided to join me at the Argentinian Capitol for a short vacation.
Buenos Aires is somber and very euro barroque, when compared to other cities of the Latin American cone it is glam and simply put is the classiest.
It's a beautiful and romantic town, the immense Rio de la Plata inlet and the old part of the City, particularly Barrio del Boca evokes Maradona, the Quilmes Soccer Squadra and the inevitable group of kids whistling tangos.
If you pay close attention you may spot Gardel's ghost, wandering around town on a Saturday night, hidden in an oxford grey cashmere coat. It was in this city of tangos, of romantic temper tantrums where I saw her for the first time: sitting on a couch at the lobby as I entered the hotel.
Blond like golden hay under the hard country sun on a hot summer day, green eyes like an emerald jade washed on Botafogo beach, like a sacredly cat, frightened and shy, yet ready to pounce. High cheeks and a curvy plumped devilish body of a Marilyn Monroe at fifteen. I still remember her as if I had seen her yesterday.
Her eyes were on me like mine on her, we spoke of nonsense and from that moment on we fell in an urgent and immediate hurricane of teen love. We spent every second of every moment of every sigh stolen from every hour borrowed from the week that would become the happiest days of our lives.
Hiding behind doors and street corners, kissing and holding each other at the brink of sin, crushing our fingers as we ran holding hands through the blue city in unstoppable excitement. Always wanting more, like young vampires, craving each other and discovering each other in words and looks and scents and we just knew that we belonged together and the world could have stopped turning, it did, and we didn't care.
After fife or seven days she finally left, her face like one big tear, holding purple flowers behind the tinted windows of a black Mercedes Benz.
I ran up to my hotel room where I remained locked up for three days, wondering why my heart looked like a broken vase, some pieces on the sidewalk of Maipu street, some at the lobby where we met, some had left with her.
My Mother somehow convinced the hotel manager that there was a water leak in my room, that is how the rivers I cried eventually reached Mar del Plata and that is how Buenos Aires became a part of me, that was when I had to let go of the most precious thing I have ever had.
I flew back to Brazil and she flew back to the States and to say that I've forgotten those emerald eyes would be a lie, this was 23 years ago.

(yes, we spoke on the phone a couple of days ago and it was the strangest deja vu feeling but at the same time it was just amazing)

Y es que empiezo a pensar
and I begin to think
que el amor verdadero es tan sólo el primero.
true love is just the first
Y es que empiezo a sospechar
and I begin to suspect
que los demás son sólo para olvidar
that the rest are just to forget.