colors

today daniel and i go shopping for a new guitar, my birthday present to myself, and its a beautiful day, warm enough to walk without a sweater on and let my tattoo breathe. daniel is the ideal male specimen but i am emotionally bankrupt and he has a wonderful girlfriend so our friendship is completely platonic and easy. we walk the streets of san diego, go into every music store and try different guitars for hours. the silence is welcome and comfortable and he always opens doors for me and talks to me in this sort of brotherly way that makes me feel safe and so its a perfect afternoon.
we stop for sodas, a coke for me and a fanta for him and i tell him as we pass the plaza de san francisco that fanta has at least 12 cups of sugar in one can. he seems alarmed but not overwhelmingly so and we continue walking. the architecture in this part of the city is my favorite, old crumbling buildings and broken out diamond shaped windows, towering balconies and bullgonia flowers spilling through cracks in walks, chain link fences and like weeds running purple and scarlet. we walk past one of the oldest churches in chile, dating back to the 1600s and we both get quiet for a minute as we pass before he asks me some silly question and i half punch his shoulder on the crowded street, making him bump into a group of girls, who scowl then giggle and he spills fanta down his chin and we laugh.
we go to tip top, the most talked about cookie place in santiago, which ive never been to before. he says to me, im kind of starving, can we get a snack. and i laugh at the juxtaposition of those two words. he says why dont we go over to this place thats close by and buy a bunch of cookies. this strikes me as odd. i never eat cookies. theyre just not my thing. but here in santiago, people are crazy for cookies, even eating them for breakfast. at tip top it is insanely crowded and like most places in the centro you get a number and wait for it to be called. it is fairly efficient and extremely annoying, waiting for the little red lights to flash your number, giving you five seconds or less to reach them before they pass on to the next person. but waiting with daniel is pleasant, we stand outside on the street and people watch, its friday afternoon and people are getting of work, leaving early for the weekend, buying hats and scarves and hair pins from street vendors and we just sip our sodas in silence and watch. i feel like im 15 and waiting for something big to happen, something grand, but with that underlying feeling that things will stay just the same.
when our number is called we wait for our pound of cookies anxiously, they put an assortment in and you get what you get although daniel asks for extra of a thin crispy brandy kind and the lady hesitates before he smiles at her and she melts, like girls do around him and puts five more in the bag, all stuck together, warm and sticky sweet.
we walk a couple more blocks just eating cookies, they are so good and doughy and fresh that we begin singing songs to our cookies while crossing the street. love songs, silly elaborate songs to our afternoon treats as we cross streets with names that mean something to me. santa rosa, paris, san francisco, serena, benjamin vacuna and so on and so on.
by the time we get back to the first guitar store we have walked the centro up and down and its getting dark. i go to the post office to leave some mail, packaged nicely and with care and daniel appreciates my hand designed envelopes, says he never gets any mail and we decide to find pen pals, but not each other, people we dont already feel we know so much about.
at the music store i go back to the first guitar i tried. a bright blue steel string acoustic and its just calling to me. he says, i knew you wanted that one all along and i ask why he let me walk all over the city looking at other guitars when the one i wanted was the first one i saw. and he said, it was a beautiful day to look at guitars, just to make sure, this is the one you want. and besides, we wouldnt have had the cookies.
he is right, though, i think, as we head back to my house, sopapillas for dinner and palta and wine and i cant help thinking that we have to make this journey, we have to do many things, see many places, play many different guitars to know what is right. even if we knew from the start. because along the way, there will be familiar street names, a lot of laughter and of course, cookies.