The sound of jingling keys cease and a certain metal fertilization begins when the male key enters the female slot, the tenant has the tact, I hear, to turn the antique key just right, and the door slowly creaks open over the groan of the antique elevator and her dusty cables that sometimes creak as well. I can hear the sounds of loud anonymous booms sometimes at a distance, sometimes at a close, mostly fireworks, sometimes thunder, other times I think its an Argentine mob collapsing on the Plaza de Mayo for retribution. And the car horns echo through draftways over the peugots and between the neo-colonial buildings who have sat ignoring the street for a century, maybe two, undisturbed, unamused and uninterested.

Then theres me who hears them.

The people who talk loud on the street can be heard outside the rectangle window with the black curtain. It shines. At night I can see myself in it, unexcited by what I see I take my fingers through my thinning hair and I touch my nose and look blankly. I'm 26 now. I will not be 26 for much longer. How much longer will I look young? I ask again. And then I forget again what I was doing, feeling vain and lost, I continue around the apartment looking for something to do on these long days I wait and wait. I wait to hear about the endless CVs that I send out yesterday and the day before. I eat a mandarin. And then another. Maybe I will have a joint with Andres, maybe I won't.

I lay in the cubby hole where my bed is, above Andres snoring and sometimes Danish kissess, and I remember Matthias being to scared to light the joint the day in Puerto Iguazu when Mike became sick and had to return to sit in a chair all day. And then I think of Marta, when she was sick, and then I think how we all laid in peril awaiting death under the tall pines by the lake. And then I think of lakes and all the lakes I had seen in my life, and I become depressed, as if I will never see a lake again. Why? I don't know.

I am here now, and I can't seem to escape it. I run in circles, should I have gotten off the bus? I love it. I'm too clean. I want to sleep outside in a beautiful place. I chose this. It was a good choice. It had to be done. I'm just lonely. I'll be fine in a month. I miss what I had not what they have now. But isn't it the same. Why am I tormented? Why can't I sleep? I'm afraid that was the highlight of my life. I don't want it to be. I want to keep going.