I shaved at Héctor's sink because the face in the window had started to look like someone else's problem. The razor is older than the trip. The soap is not. I put on the cream shirt and the cap and walked toward the polished end of town, which in Oaxaca is a pedestrian street named Macedonio Alcalá that has been practising being beautiful for a long time.
Yesterday's coffee was a wobbly table near the zócalo and a drink that was merely coffee. I had told myself I would walk the strip and stand at a counter like a person who knows what he is doing. Café Brújula at Alcalá 104 lists a flat white. They have a courtyard. Plants. People with laptops who arrived with a plan. I stood for a minute with the cup because that was the point, and then I sat because there was nowhere that wanted me standing. It was a good cup. It was not the one. I am still looking.
The street fills from the cathedral end. A boy selling gum had a speech I only caught the end of. A woman in a doorway was sewing something the colour of the walls. I walked as far as Santo Domingo and sat on the steps in the shade of the façade, which is the sort of stone that makes you feel briefly well-behaved. A dog slept through a whole argument about parking. I did not take a picture. Yesterday I used up the ones that were for sending.
Back through the market because I was hungry in a way the courtyard had not touched. Mercado Benito Juárez is louder than 20 de Noviembre and less interested in whether you have arrived. Two memelas, salsa that announced itself, a plastic stool that had opinions about my weight. I ate them and walked home before the sky did what August skies do here.
The rain came at four as if it had a reservation. I was two streets from the green house. The navy jacket lives at the bottom of the pack for this. Héctor's door stuck the way it stuck yesterday. I am writing this from the roof again. The plastic chair has dried. The mountains have that washed look. Tomorrow I will walk a different street, or the same one. Sunday is still four days away, and Tlacolula can wait.
— Finn