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ACT I

May 2024

TITLE: PAUSE

CATEGORY: Incident + System

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PHOTO 01 — EVIDENCE / SCENE: night / house / threshold

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After day 365, the house entered an administrative pause: the thermal silence of a home after impact. The broken glass had been swept away, but the air was still contaminated by a framework that had already assumed failure.

What happened with Carlota was the last contaminated scene entering through the wrong channel. The sentence at the bar—that public evaluation of whether I loved Camilo enough—did not vanish with the apologies. It only lowered in volume. The form that followed was cleaner: grief, saturation, proper conversation. I accepted it. But an apology does not close a file. It only reduces the noise of the error.

The house was left suspended. Not blank.

And beneath that suspension, another variable kept vibrating, refusing to switch off: desire. Opening the relationship had, in theory, been a valve. In practice, it became something else: an agreement without closure, a floodgate left open with a padlock of distrust installed at the same time.

I returned to Grindr not as a romantic search, but as a clandestine permission to exist. A bell to check that there was still air. A functional anesthetic: it does not heal, but it clears the interference for a few minutes. One night I went out. A brief encounter. Body to body. No epic. I knew what I was doing, and I also knew I was disguising times and details as if that could still count as damage control.

When I came back, the flat was staged like a set without actors: hallway silent, Estela behind the door, the entrance turned into a border.

I looked at my phone.

There was a screenshot.

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ANNEX A — PHOTO: screenshot / evidence

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