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December 2023 · Christian Ives Solis
RECORD XX — December 2023: the function
Christmas 2023 left a strange residue in my throat. Camilo got sick, and the house entered that domestic mode where everything seems small, but the body already knows the floor is shifting beneath its feet.
That night I ate alone what I had prepared for both of us. The table was set with that minimal choreography—two plates, two glasses—and when I sat down, the absence became fully material when I looked at the empty plate on the other side. Deborah came into the dining room when I started eating, asking for a quick stroke with her snout, but after a while she went back inside. That animal instinct that detects before anyone else where the ground is trembling. When I finished, I got up and washed his untouched plate under the tap, erasing the arrangement.
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Later I went into the bedroom to check on him. He was shivering. The room was cold, and he was wearing only a T-shirt. I did what I do when affection requires body before thought: I brought the thermometer, poured a glass of water, sat on the edge of the mattress, and counted his breathing. The day stopped being ours and became the fever’s. Camilo reached for my hand for a second beneath the sheet. An anchor. Holding that once is fine. Twice, too. But something began to shift in the function. As if there were a role no one had asked me to assume and I were already performing it on autopilot.
The feeling became clear at seven in the morning. I was standing outside an illuminated pharmacy window on duty, waiting for them to hand me a box of paracetamol capable of correcting something. Barcelona was still dark, in that damp and freezing hour when it is no longer fully night, but not yet morning either. Standing there in the cold, I had the exact physical impression of crossing a border. I was no longer his partner. It was no longer only love. I felt like his father.
When the pharmacist handed me the medicine through the slot in the glass, I wished her happy holidays out of pure human reflex, out of inertia.
I walked home quickly, gripping the cardboard box in my hand. When affection becomes logistics for too long, the body begins to occupy functions no one ever named.
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RULE 04: Fever does not argue; it assigns hierarchies.
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