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August 2023 · Christian Ives Solis
RECORD XVI — August 2023: the precedent
July arrived the way major visits do: without asking the nervous system for permission. The new house still had air, but from one day to the next it stopped feeling like oxygen and became an observable environment. As if the air had suddenly grown eyes.
Camilo’s grandmothers arrived, Ana and Carmen. And with them came Deborah. Eleven years old, loose hair moving through the hallway, and an affective homeland on four legs. Deborah did not enter the house like a pet; she entered like a flag. She was a piece of family history that does not need to ask permission because it feels that the right of ownership already belongs to it by antiquity.
I tried to set one minimal domestic clause, one small civil boundary before the lights went out:
—Deborah doesn’t sleep in the bed.
Camilo let out that light laugh that already carries the verdict hidden inside it:
—We’ll see.
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The first night there was no discussion, because the physical fact installed itself long before any dialogue. When I entered the bedroom, Deborah was already in the exact center of the bed. Warm, breathing heavily, as if the mattress had always been hers. There was a damp mark of saliva on my pillowcase. A foreign heartbeat setting the shutdown rhythm of the world.
It was not only Deborah. It was the precedent.
I lay down on my side. I felt the edge of the mattress narrower, my body calculating millimetrically how to fit itself without invading or being invaded by the animal. By the second night, the reflex had already been learned: before crossing the bedroom threshold, my chest was already tightening. The method was perfectly clear: the facts install themselves first, the conversation arrives when there is nothing left to do.