<aside>
</aside>
March 2024 · Christian Ives Solis
RECORD XXIII — March 2024: the floodgate
By March, what we had been trying not to name became impossible to deny: the sexual distance had stopped being an understandable parenthesis and had become a habit.
The pressure from third parties entered the house without even coming through the door. Carlota kept appearing in Camilo’s orbit with the classic “let’s go have tea.” There was no major scene, only repetition and detachment. That uncomfortable intuition in the pit of the stomach when you notice voices drop the moment you walk into the kitchen. Things were being talked about that no longer included me.
When I turned off the light and lay down, the first thing my body registered was the absence of contact. It was not only sex. It was signal. The body looking for that minimal form of physical confirmation that used to open the way and now bounced dryly against emptiness. We slept together, but the exact space between the two mattresses felt like a border drawn in thick chalk.
I understood the blockage. Migratory stress is a heavy animal that sleeps right between two people. I was not going to turn desire into a contractual obligation, nor was I going to force the machine. But I also could not keep holding the air inside a relationship where contact had disappeared completely without any conversation capable of containing that absence.
Breakfast still happened every morning. Contact did not.
That was when the proposal to open the relationship appeared. It was not a modern idea. It was a floodgate. I wanted to lower the thermal pressure of confinement, to keep the lack of skin from turning into resentment, to protect the bond without suffocating it.
<aside>
</aside>
The scene had the rigidity of a bureaucratic sketch. The bedroom in half-light. Deborah lying at the foot of the bed, watching us attentively. Camilo stroking the dog’s head over and over in order to stabilize the environment. Me trying to sound human, casual, while feeling control mode activate in my muscles: straight posture, fixed jaw, short breath. For me, the proposal had simple rules: discretion, respect, never inside our home. I did not need names or activity reports.
But Camilo began processing the proposal as if drafting a customs form in real time. Frequency. Conditions. Limits. How many times per month. Which exact days.