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February 2024 · Christian Ives Solis
RECORD XXII — February 2024: Porto
In February, we bought tickets to Porto. We were not going there to save anything. We were going to see whether the nervous system might loosen, even if only for forty-eight hours.
The trip exposed the brutal mismatch in our operating modes. Camilo fought anxiety by preparing everything with a ridiculous margin of error: checking, packing, taking things out, checking again. I functioned the opposite way. Exactly fifteen minutes to pack my bag. A ten-minute shower. And fifteen minutes later I was already dressed, standing by the door, waiting without making a sound.
At first it made me laugh. I teased Camilo affectionately, he laughed, and the tension in those movements softened a little. It was a minimal truce, one that gave me an excuse to hug Camilo from behind and return a bit of body to that private war being fought against the clock. But later, the sound of the suitcase wheels humming across the hallway floor announced the truth: a movement without enthusiasm. At the airport, one of us dropped a cookie on the floor. It broke. Neither of us picked it up. Neither even made the motion of bending down.
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At the same time, my phone kept vibrating in my pocket. Estela was orbiting nearby through WhatsApp. The messages arrived with a pattern I recognized far too quickly: Estela told me how Claudio and Aracely were making Estela feel in that flat, how damage could work its way into ordinary sentences. Estela wanted translation. I was already trained for that. That urgency to type back and answer immediately was not only care. It was the same old reflex as always: detect a crack and try to seal it with cement before the day starts collecting its price.
Porto still gave us moments of suspension. Walking up sloping streets without checking email. Eating without doing mental calculations. Sleeping without anticipating. The light came in diagonally through the hostel window, and the sheets smelled strongly of cheap industrial detergent. For a moment, that rough chemical smell seemed a thousand times better than the smell of our home. Not because it was cleaner. But because it carried no history.
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PROTOCOL: Short trip: truce, not repair.
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