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2023 · Christian Ives Solis
RECORD XVII — Sitges: the diagnosis
Sitges arrived as an attempt at air. Sea, open light, sand in our shoes, and summer performing its usual trick. But the sea erases nothing; salt and sunlight only illuminate what is already there.
The four of us went. Deborah orbited the perimeter of our towels as if tied to a law of physics, marking territory. At one point that afternoon, Ana convinced Camilo to go into the water and take some pictures. He got up and went happily, obediently, with the posture of someone who still needs validation. He walked off toward the waves and, suddenly, there was that strange gap in the sand: the protagonist had stepped out of the frame, and I was left sitting on the towel with the people who had written him first.
I stayed under the shade of the umbrella, with Carmen and a cold beer in my hand. I asked her about Camilo as a child. It was not social curiosity; I wanted to build a map. I wanted to understand what words had been placed on him before there were explanations for what was happening to him. Carmen smiled, looking toward the water, remembering that he could spend hours still, absorbed in himself.
And then she let it out:
—Slow.
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There was no cruelty in her tone, and that was exactly why it hit harder. It did not sound like a sudden insult. It sounded like a worn word, inherited, repeated a thousand times over family meals. The kind of label that stops feeling violent at the exact moment it does the most damage. I kept looking at the sea, the cold glass of the bottle in my fingers. I felt my chest tighten all at once, and my jaw locked shut on its own.
In that second, the heat of Sitges disappeared and another memory opened. El Quisco. Years earlier. Me as a child, sitting there, testing what it felt like to hear from both sides with a pair of wired headphones. Medical tape stuck to the left side of my head, exactly where an ear should have been. The brutal patience of childhood, which does not dramatize what is strange, but tries to solve it quietly. And my sister Carolina coming up behind me, placing a pair of headband headphones over my head without ceremony or pity, correcting the world just enough so I could keep playing. It was a tool. It did not inspire pity.
I came back to the beach. The contrast landed on me with all its weight. Mine was flesh, visible from a distance, and therefore it forced the world to produce a technical response. Camilo’s was not visible. And because the flaw was invisible, the world gave itself permission to turn it into a moral judgment.
I swallowed. I tightened my grip on the beer bottle.
—Carmen, do you know what dyslexia is?