I woke late. The roof smelled like wet stone again but the sky was already clear, the kind of blue that makes you forget the rain ever had a lease on the place. I put on the grey merino and walked without a plan, which is most of the plan lately.
Tried a café called Origen on García Vigil. They had a flat white, a counter, and a window onto the street. I stood. Two women next to me were talking fast in a Spanish I only caught the edges of — something about a cousin and Puebla and a car that wouldn't start. The cup was good. The angle was right. But the counter was four inches too low and after ten minutes my back started to complain in a way that felt like the building's problem, not mine. Still looking.
I walked south toward the market because that is where the morning goes when I let it. Benito Juárez was already loud — the vegetable sellers, the women with the flowers in buckets, the radio doing a ballad that had more feelings than the hour required. I found the chapulines man near the west entrance. Same stall as yesterday. He had them in three sizes: small, smaller, smallest. I pointed at the small. He filled a paper cone and said something I didn't catch. Fifty pesos. I nodded like I had been planning to eat fried grasshoppers all along and not circling them for three days like a nervous dog.
They tasted like salt and lime and something else I don't have a word for — earth, maybe, or the idea of earth. Crunchy in a way that made me aware of my own teeth. I ate half the cone standing in the market and felt briefly like someone who does things. The other half I folded into my pocket for later, which is when I remembered that paper does not stop smell. That was on me.
Two memelas at the usual stall because I was still hungry. The woman did not look up. She pinched and slapped and pinched the edge and I watched her hands do what they do. Asiento, salsa verde. I ate them leaning against a post, next to a man selling *tejate* in painted cups who did not want to sell me one because it was almost gone. I respected that.
By noon the heat had turned the zócalo into something biblical. I walked east instead, past the small galleries on Murguía that were closed for reasons I did not ask about, and ended up at Parque Labastida, which is less a park and more a pocket of trees with benches that have been sat on until they are kind. I sat. A woman was feeding pigeons from a plastic bag. A man in a straw hat was reading a book so small it might have been a Bible or a phone book or both. I drank water and did nothing for an hour and it felt like the most honest thing I had done all week.
Walked back through Xochimilco. Lunch was three tacos de cecina at a stand with no name, just a woman and a comal and a queue of men in work shirts who knew what they wanted. I pointed at what the man in front of me ordered. Cecina, onion, cilantro, salsa roja that made my eyes water in a way I have stopped pretending to be ready for. I ate standing because there was nowhere to sit and I was the only one who seemed to think that was a problem.