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2023 · Christian Ives Solis
RECORD XVIII — Bilbao: administrative closure
With the family history still pulsing through the house, we went to Bilbao. It was not a trip; it was a procedure. The reason was Carlota and the paperwork for her parents’ house. She had held us up many times in the past, and now it was our turn to be the infrastructure. Open doors that had been closed for months, cross out with a pen what gets thrown away and what gets kept, and decide which part of grief gets packed into cardboard boxes. There was no tourism; we went strictly in satellite mode. Be available, carry weight, ask for no protagonism.
We spent the nights in a hostel. Narrow hallways, other people’s schedules. When you do not have a square meter of your own, the chest breathes shallowly. One afternoon I walked alone through the Casco Viejo, feeling the relief of not hearing my own mind for a while and, at the same time, the exhaustion of slowly disappearing inside other people’s noise.
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I went into a museum. And there, in the middle of an empty gallery, I took my phone out of my pocket and opened Grindr.
I was not looking for anyone. What I was doing was another sport. Start a conversation, measure the response time, see the word “read” on the screen, and place the phone face down. A minimal ping vibrating against the palm of my hand just to feel that the system was still operating.
Brenda did not take long to appear. Her voice sounded dry against the white wall of the museum:
“It isn’t desire. It’s verification. You’re checking that you still exist outside the satellite role.”
I closed the app abruptly. I stood there staring at the wall with a dry shame rising up my neck. Not because of the gesture on the screen, but because of the brutal precision of the diagnosis.
On the last night, the city festivities gave that week a physical form. Narrow streets. Shoulders brushing against unknown shoulders in a crowd where the noise did not feel like joy, but like a heavy mechanism.
I looked at the flames. Then I looked at Carlota and Camilo. The patterns overlapped in front of the fire: their grief, their family responsibilities, my exhaustion as a satellite. The crowd began to move when the fire started to die down. I stayed still for one second longer, eyes fixed on the smoke, feeling the body register the metaphor: something had to be fully consumed for everything else to continue.
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PROTOCOL: When there is no territory, an emergency ping is sought.
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