Tango music wafted in the summer air of the outdoor café in a Buenos Aires plaza, and we sat, sun dappling upon us as we craned our necks, looking for the server, checking the time on our watches, and letting our heads drop on whatever surface was closest—the shoulder of a friend, our folded arms on the table. 

​

     A dozen of us, Peace Corps volunteers let loose of being the village idiots for the first time in seven months, red wine hungover and shaky, pined for milanesa de carne and empanadas, as the hour crept past 3 p.m. and hit the forty-fifth minute after placing our lunch order, what would be the first food of the day for our suffering stomachs. 

​

     “Eh, excuse me,” Caroline said to the server in the Spanish we were all starting to wield with a bit more confidence, though her clipped accent was right out of the classroom. I imagined her next sentence sounded to him like, “Our food ready soon?”

 

     He said something quickly to her that we missed, and she turned to report, grabbing at her short, curly hair: “He said they haven't even started making it.”

 

     Our chairs scraped the concrete and we swarmed out.

 

     The mood turned very Every Man for Himself. We strung out along the sidewalk, in groups of two or three, mixed in with the crowded foot traffic, trying to make whatever decision would get us fed fastest. 

 

     It would be better to break the group up, someone yelled. People toward the front wanted to go to a churrascaria, that walking buffet of meat. Toward the back, there was talk of going to La Boca, an artsy neighborhood nearby. 

 

     I clung close to Caroline who was, and I mean this in the nicest way, the group bitch. This was a group that needed a bitch, someone to say, “Come on, we’re leaving now!” or the dozen of us would have starved in the street. She walked about ten feet behind me as I tried to catch up with the churrascaria group. I assumed we were going together, until I turned around and saw her back as she strode away from me, toward the La Boca crew. I tend to cling to strong and decisive people, riding their life choices like a koala bear rides its mother, so I yelled goodbye to the churrascarias and then turned to scurry back with Caroline. 

 

     When I saw that a cab had stopped and we were getting in, I ran toward them. But the driver waved a palm at me, indicating that I, the fifth, couldn’t fit. He started off, rounding the corner, filling me with dense panic and leaving me sputtering, “But! But!”

 

     “Come to La Boca!” Caroline yelled through the window, referring to a neighborhood of fifty-thousand people. 

 

     “Where?” I yelled.

 

     In the last moment before the building on the corner swiped her out of view, she pulled back her lips in awkward distress and held up her hands in a shrug for which she would not sufficiently apologize, and I would not fully forgive her until a Korean BBQ dinner in New York City eight years later. 

 

     Then they were gone. I turned around and didn’t see anyone but strangers, the churrascaria group having turned. Somewhere.

 

     Don’t judge me: I had neither the hostel’s address nor any way to contact my friends, nor any plan for what to do in case we got separated. Our Peace Corps phones didn’t work there. We had tumbled out of our host country in such chaos and in such a pack, led by Caroline’s 30-something sophistication and willingness to yell us all into a line heading the same direction, that I was simply and absolutely not prepared. And now, in a fog of tango music trailing across the crowds, I was lost. 

 

     I’m not sure how becoming lost was etched into such a phobia for me. Perhaps it was the memory of my mother hugging me when I was about eight, sobbing and rocking on a curb at a public beach in Florida, half-circled by the black pants of the police officers who’d been searching for me. I hadn’t thought I was lost. I had just followed the signs for the hammocks and was disappointed when all I found at the end of the long trail was a bunch of trees. Her reddened face, her gasps, the tears that wet my own face, churn in me still. 

 

     Perhaps it was my terrible sense of direction. Is there a thing like face-blindness, but for streets and landmarks? Can I get tested and receive some kind of service animal? 

 

     Perhaps it was that my directional deficiencies were also coupled with a delusion that this time, I knew where I was going. 

 

     Or perhaps it was the nightmares. My subconscious remixed the same themes: a massive place, lots of people, and the feeling that I was in the wrong place and needed to find the right one. My brain has an unlimited budget for sets and props and character development for these little plays, an impressive oeuvre of combinations—I’m in a mall, a music festival, a bus station—so many ways to evoke the feeling I was having right then, in real life, in a city I did not know. 

 

     I also have generalized anxiety disorder, which is relevant. 

Amid hordes of cosmopolitan porteños (think New Yorkers but sexier) and strolling tourists, I was too embarrassed to run. But I walked fast through the crowd, trying to catch up to the churrascaria group. The sidewalk thinned of humans a few blocks up, but I didn’t see my friends anywhere.

 

     I tried not to cry. Because I was a twenty-six-year-old adult. Yet as I went from restaurant window to restaurant window, peering in at all the non-lost, non-alone, non-hungry people, I became a little girl again; I started to cry like one.

 

     A half-hour of wandering later, I hailed a black and yellow cab.

 

     “I’m at the Nomade II,” I said. 

 

     “And the address?”

 

     I did my best please-save-me face. “I don’t know.”

 

     His eyes in the rearview told me he was not in the mood to save anyone. I was annoyed that he hadn’t memorized every hostel in the second largest city in South America. 

 

     Finally, I remembered the name of a small plaza nearby, and after circling in the San Telmo neighborhood, we found the hostel. I asked him to wait outside.  

 

     But the bunks in our dorm sat empty. Of course. It struck me that both groups probably assumed I was with the other. If they didn’t realize I was lost, they weren’t looking for me, and most likely I’d be alone all day, or even, if our previous schedules offered any indication, almost until dawn of the next day. Both groups were most likely enjoying their afternoons, forging inside jokes I’d have to endure for the remainder of my life with the knowledge that I had been abandoned on the street by she whom I trusted most.  

 

     It would feel safe, but stupid, to stay in the hostel. At least it was some kind of home base, but I would most likely stew with every second that ticked by. Why didn’t they stop the cab? Just say stop, and get out? Didn’t they know I would be left alone?

 

     The resistance clenched inside me, sitting on the bunk bed in the silent and empty hostel room, though I knew my options were to sit there and stoke my anger, or accept it. The cab waited outside for me to decide.

 

     The higher part of myself, the part that knows we travelers must stick to the same code as the improv actor, the Yes and, dragged me back onto the street. It’s only fun if you roll with it, she told my other, pouting self, even if “it,” your trip, is veering into one of your nightmares. 

 

     I had the driver drop me where he had picked me up. And then I tried my damnedest to pretend I had chosen to spend a day alone in Buenos Aires. 

 

     I decided to go for a sight-seeing walk, where the thought, "How could she just leave me like that?" kept popping into my head. I pushed it down. I pretended my inner state could best be expressed with a stroll. 

 

     Here you are, in South America. 

 

     Here you are, on a lovely street of neoclassical buildings. 

 

     Hello, Mr. Gargoyle. 

 

     You have the day to yourself. You’re alone, and you’re okay. Here’s a market. Here’s some jewelry to look at. 

 

     “But they just…” 

 

     Shhh. 

 

     Here’s a tangoing couple. Here, have an empanada.

 

     Here’s a graffiti artist. His can spraying pshhht, pshhht, forming the arms of a cartoony character. Since no one’s watching, why don’t you talk to him? 

 

     He turned and smiled at me. Cute. Brazilian. 

 

     “Are you a porteña?” he asked. 

 

     I laughed. No, American. We chatted about his art, the city, and I found myself having a lovely little time. 

 

     Years later my mom would say she worried about me every day in South America until that time I got lost in Buenos Aires. I had worried about me, too. But something happened that day, something that set me in motion to be the kind of woman who would later backpack for three months, mostly alone, from Colombia to Paraguay. 

 

     I learned to be lost, to keep it on the surface, merely location. I found myself, here, now, a random pin of consciousness in the world, companionable to what was, talking to this person I hadn’t known existed just five minutes earlier and—"Rubia!" 

 

     Blondie!

 

     My nickname, from across the street.

 

     There: my friends. The churrascaria group, strolling and clearly fed by now, clueless and faultless for what I’d been going through. 

 

     I turned toward the graffiti artist, said I should probably go, and trotted to my friends, not bitterly crying for attention, with no need to take from them the enjoyment they’d been feeling to fill my own pit. I ran to meet them where they were. 

​

​