The Cantina | La Cantina
"A cantina owner and a traveling musician find a rhythm that keeps them both coming back"
The Cantina
La Cantina
She walked into my cantina with a guitar case and a story in her eyes.
"Do you need a musician?" she asked.
"Depends. Are you any good?"
"Let me play, and you decide."
Her name was Rocío, and she'd been traveling for years—playing wherever people paid, sleeping wherever they'd let her.
"Why traveling?" I asked.
"Because staying feels like giving up."
"On what?"
"On finding what I'm looking for."
She played that night, and my cantina came alive. Old men wept at rancheras. Young lovers danced to cumbias. I stood behind my bar, mesmerized.
"You're hired," I said when she finished.
"For how long?"
"As long as you'll stay."
"I never stay long."
She stayed a week. Then a month. The cantina became her home between songs.
"Why this place?" she asked.
"Why do you keep asking questions?"
"I'm trying to understand why I don't want to leave."
"Maybe you found what you were looking for."
I kissed her after a late night, when the cantina was empty and the music still echoed.
"This complicates things," she said.
"Life is complicated."
"I don't do roots. I don't do permanent."
"Neither do I." I pulled her close. "But temporary can be beautiful."
We loved in moments—between songs, between customers, between the coming and going that defined her life.
"I have to leave," she said after three months.
"I know."
"But I'll come back."
"Will you?"
"I always come back to beautiful things."
She left. Came back. Left again. Each time, the cantina waited. Each time, I waited.
"Why do you stay?" she asked once.
"Because roots mean something. Because consistency has value. Because someone has to be the home others return to."
"Is that what I am? Someone returning?"
"You're my favorite someone."
Eventually, she stopped leaving. Age, maybe. Exhaustion. Or something simpler.
"I think I'm done traveling," she said one morning.
"Why?"
"Because I found what I was looking for."
"What's that?"
"A place that feels more like home than anywhere else. A person who makes the road seem unnecessary."
She plays at my cantina every night now. The tourists call her legendary. The locals call her ours.
"To the wanderer," I toast.
"To the one who made me stop," she answers.
La cantina—where travelers rest, roots grow, and love plays on repeat.