<aside> 🧾

ACT II

TITLE: EJECT

CATEGORY: Social + Body + Procedure

</aside>

<aside>

PHOTO 01 — EVIDENCE / SCENE:

</aside>

A few days later, Amaro blocked me on everything. It did not surprise me. A clean move within the logic of the group. More than rejection, I read it as closing ranks with that social efficiency that from the outside looks like adulthood and, from the inside, is pure convenience. It was easier to label me as aggressive than to look at the underlying issue. Easier to assign me the role of problem than to review the economy of loyalties that had long been using my name as an excuse. What weighed on me was not losing them. It was seeing clearly that the narrative kept being written without me, but always about me.

That was when the body did what it does when the mind no longer wants to keep processing. I went skating. I went out to get tired enough not to think. To give the body a task simpler than holding up the narrative, the group, the couple, and the file all at once.

And then came the fall.

<aside>

ANNEX A — PHOTO

</aside>

I did not experience it first as pain. I experienced it as disconnection. The body was no longer inside an emotional scene. It was against the asphalt. I got up with a dry vibration in the titanium of my ear. A medical report is also a document. The body, once again, turned into an attachment as if the impact itself did not count.

I did not report “damage.” I reported an “incident.”

I went to the mutual insurance clinic the way one processes weather. Procedure without temperature. The next day, the doctor let out a sentence that changed the texture of the week: possible neurological damage; four days to know whether something inside was broken. As if the body already knew that, at this stage, every important warning would arrive with a form, a waiting period, and a margin of uncertainty.

The pattern became clear: use air as anesthesia, and then turn air into paperwork. In the middle of that suspension, I said something I had been holding in for too long. That I was going to stop fighting the day he stopped fighting. That this time I was trying to do it right. Like an adult.

There was no immediate response. He went to sleep in the living room. Deborah stayed there too, as if the conflict needed a witness even when no one was speaking. I stayed still so the trembling would not show.