where i've been, where i'm going

Twelve days mostly on foot, mostly in Chiado and Alfama. Wrote an entire chapter in a café whose name I never learned. The light at the end of the day was the colour of a flat white, which is now the title of an essay. Came home with three notebooks, a bag of beans from Comoba, and the suspicion that I’d left part of the novel there on purpose.

The trip I’d put off for years. Stayed in a small ryokan north of the river and walked an absurd amount each day — Daitoku-ji in the morning, used bookstores in the afternoon, hojicha and rain on every other surface. The notebook I started there is still my favourite. Came back changed in the small ways trips are supposed to change you and didn’t in any of the ways I’d expected.

Eleven days of single-origin coffee, mole, and the kind of late-morning sun that argues with you. The roasters in Oaxaca treat coffee like a quiet, technical art and the tortillas like a religion, and both attitudes are correct. Wrote less than I’d planned, walked more than I’d planned, ate everything. Plan to go back during Día de los Muertos when the light will be different again.

A short one. Going for the dark, the cold, and a particular kind of silence I want to hear before finishing the short story. Will work from Reykjavík Roasters and read in the long evenings. If the aurora cooperates, fine; if not, the dark itself is the point.

Three weeks I’ve been planning for a year. The plan is bookstores first — El Ateneo, Libros del Pasaje, every used shop on Avenida Corrientes — and then everything else. Want to write a chapter of the novel from a café in San Telmo and see what the city does to it. Booking flights this month.