I owe sixteen nights. That is the first thing, and it is late, and I am sorry.
I have been writing from Héctor's roof as if the decade started when the bus doors opened in Oaxaca. It did not. It started in a hostel kitchen in Roma Norte on someone else's Wi-Fi, with a flight still in my legs and a map I kept folding toward the next city before I had finished this one. I did not post. I told myself the days were for walking, not for sending. Putting a day on the internet felt like spending it twice, and I was already tired. That is not a good reason. It is the one I had.
Mexico City was the first stop because there is no overland Atlantic. Glasgow to Amsterdam to MEX, seventeen hours of lighting I do not like, and then the overland part of the ten years could actually begin. I did not pick it for a postcard. I picked it because it was where the buses start.
I took a sitio from the airport because the pack had opinions after the flight. Roma Norte was the bed — a hostel with a kitchen that belonged to everyone and therefore to no one, a bunk or a room I am already mixing up, sixteen nights of the same street door. I walked. That is most of what I did with the time. Álvaro Obregón in the morning before it performed. Plaza Río de Janeiro when I needed a square that was not trying. Side streets until the trees started to look like a neighborhood and not a layover. Spanish like walking into a door with my shoulder. People were kinder than the grammar. I kept apologising in the wrong tense.
The cafés were decent and I never found the one. I stood when they would let me and sat when they would not. I did not write down the names. I was still looking, the same way I am still looking here. The first week I hovered. The second week I was already folding the map south, which is a habit I would like to be worse at.
Roma Norte was the favorite, if favorite is the word. I did not stay in three neighborhoods and award a prize. I stayed in one and walked out of it and came back to the same door. Condesa was a park I crossed. Centro was a day of stone and noise I did not know how to stand in. Roma was the kitchen and the street I could find in the dark. That is as close as I got to choosing.
I am writing this from the roof again. The plastic chair, the mountains, the radio downstairs doing its sincere work. The sixteen nights are on the ledger now, the way they should have been while I was living them. I am sorry I left them blank. Tomorrow I will write the day I am actually in, or I will walk and forget again. I am trying not to forget again.
— Finn