To Build A City

by Courtney Justus

Featured art: Untitled photograph by Coley Spencer

Time is a city you build with your own hands. It is not just the city, but every single building laid out in the landscape of your mind. Time is the apartment building pool where you swam in eighth grade, wanting scrapbook-worthy pictures and for the boy who played “Wonderwall” on his guitar to love you. Time is the third-floor classroom covered wall to wall in cartoon character drawings, the neon poster you made with garments labeled in French, which the chomba-clad boys would later tear to pieces. Time is the shaded pool fringed with jasmines where you swam every summer day for four years. Time is your grandmother’s red-tiled garden, bright with magenta limpiabotellas and pristine orchids, a garden which you have barely set foot in, even though your grandmother has lived in that house for over ten years. Time is the ten blocks you walked along Castro Barros after taking the 343, when you got tired of waiting for one of the 707s and figured it might feel like you got home faster if you just took the first bus that came your way. Time is the Plaza de Martínez where you told the curly-haired saxophonist you couldn’t do this anymore, and you can’t remember what he was wearing but you recall that the kiosco where you bought orange Villasur was playing “Shallow Hal,” which you never saw in its entirety. 

Time is a city I am forever reconstructing, a house I am constantly remodeling. I am not the amalgamation of the places where I’ve lived. I’m their blended shadows, a negative turned neon then clarified or blurred. When I remember Buenos Aires, I think of blueberries and walnuts laid out on a friend’s table, the sharp cerulean of my first bedroom walls, the smell of beef empanadas warmed in my grandmother’s oven, the golden glow of the stage where I did not have to be scared. I’m not afraid of public speaking. I’m afraid of what cities people will build of my words. If they will take my story into a building of their construction and then claim I am not allowed to enter.

When my brain builds a story, it builds a city. Sometimes it is the same city of the berries on the table, backstage hugs and cracked suburban streets. Sometimes it is a sprawling land or expanding road, like the highways I took to my old job, I-59 and Wilcrest all the way, the passing of strip malls and stop signs almost rhythmic, like a metronome. Many nights, my brain builds a story about a person, embedded into the landscape in which I knew them. Like the artist I met in a meditation course, who knew the saxophonist from school. Even though the artist never asked me out, I wondered what would’ve happened if we’d dated. The “What ifs” of people, their cities and relationships, accumulate like marbles in a jar, like jars in a kitchen I am always expanding. City as kitchen where I sip black tea, cook lentils and potatoes, contemplate the remotest possibilities of love. 

Buenos Aires sits on el Río de la Plata. River of silver, silver tint tainted with contamination along banks and shores. For three years, I lived by Cape Fear, where the Atlantic Ocean winks at Highway 76. Some nights, city offered me a layered sunset pouring over the crescent moon of sand and lightly wrinkled coin of water, cold wind biting my ears above my thrift store peacoat. Other times, city tapped me on the shoulder, said here is the bookstore, the coffee shop with the chocolate labradoodle that walked over to greet you, the street corner tavern where you drank seltzer and wore mauve lipstick, back when you thought love just meant something different from what you used to have. 

My brain is a city I am always remodeling. I curse when paint drips, when the cement is spread goopy like icing or thin like paper, when the pictures I’ve hung are not in line with the walls. Sometimes, city visits me like a fish swimming up from a pond, moving its small lips as if to thank me for being here. When I lived in Buenos Aires, I often focused on just getting through the day, because even making it through one school day without crying felt like a triumph. Now, I think of the friends I did make, the meals we shared, the ones who offered me a place to sleep without me even having to ask. Sometimes, city hands me a memory wrapped in greasy factura paper, bus receipts, pink tissue paper, and tells me to keep it safe. 

My brain is a city I reconstruct and remember. The Buenos Aires I remember is not the one that currently exists. I can imagine its highways but do not know what it is like to take two buses to university, or work, or the doctor’s office. I can see the brick villas bordering downtown but have never known what it is like to live there because I grew up privileged. I do not know how much it currently costs to buy a loaf of bread, a pound of red meat, a liter of gas, dinner out, but know it has only gotten more expensive since I left. Even people who made Buenos Aires the city I knew have gone elsewhere. One bright spirit to study art in Spain, up north where pink shrimp make crescents on ceramic platters. One rockstar to New York and The New School, to keep making music. One good soul to Germany, where she kneads and hammers at buildings with her own hands. 

I do not know if I want the city of my youth, the city of now, or another one altogether. But in my stories, I can build the city that I believe needs to exist. I can listen.

Courtney Justus is a Texan-Argentinian writer living in Chicago. Her adolescence spent in Buenos Aires and her Argentinian heritage frequently inform her work across genres. She is a 2022 Tin House YA Workshop alumna and a recipient of residencies from Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) and Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work appears in Defunkt Magazine, Thin Air Magazine, Sky Island Journal, Jet Fuel Review ,and elsewhere. You can visit her at courtneyjustuswriter.wordpress.com or on Instagram @courtneyjustuswriter.

Coley Spencer currently lives in Nashville, TN working as a labor and delivery nurse and a wedding videographer. She has always loved photography and took extreme interest while studying abroad in Paris. She gets her creative eye from her mother who is an oil painter. You can find more of Coley's work at coleyspencer.com.