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March 2023 · Christian Ives Solis
RECORD IX — March 2023: the crash and the erasure
Camilo and I came back at night. The alcohol from the previous hours amplified the electricity that had been building all day. I opened the front door, and the first thing I saw was how clean everything was. The house was spotless. As if the occupation of the pot could be resolved with dish soap and polish.
There was no trace of my anger left here.
I swallowed.
I started shouting.
Wood against floor. Dry.
At the evidence that my place could be occupied, overruled, and then cleaned away as if my existence were nothing more than a spill on the countertop. In that electrical overload, the body went looking for an object to absorb the impact. The living room table exploded. I grabbed it and threw it. My hands were shaking.
Camilo stood there looking at me. I cried at the evidence that a domestic betrayal can take you to a point where you no longer understand how to hold yourself together without breaking something physical. He held me to bring me back to the real world, helped me get into the bedroom, and helped lower the current running through my body. That night was a blackout from sheer nervous exhaustion. The physical limit marked what the symbolic limit could no longer hold.
When I woke up, the fatigue weighed more than the hangover. I heard them talking in the hallway. They did not knock on the door. They talked about “the table” out loud so I would hear. An oral hearing with no defendant present. Camilo went to work. I left a little later. Claudio crossed paths with me in the hallway and said we needed to talk. I kept walking. Aracely insisted from her doorway. I marked the limit:
—Not now.
On Monday afternoon, I was walking along Passeig de Gràcia when a WhatsApp message came in.
Two days passed with the story circulating through the house. Two days of crossing each other in the kitchen like ghosts. Visible name: Estela. I opened it. “Christian, it’s Claudio, we need to talk.” Someone else’s phone as a mask, authorship concealed in order to bypass the block. The same method in another interface: turning Saturday’s fury into Monday’s procedure.
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→ RECORD X
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