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April 2024 · Christian Ives Solis
RECORD XXIV — April 2024: extinction
April brought another kind of pressure. Colder. Cleaner. With official letterhead.
While the house kept trying to hold itself together, my file with Daniel entered intensive mode. What until then had been a residence permit through a registered partnership became a strictly technical question: what would happen to my card if I legally dissolved a bond that, affectively, had already been broken for some time.
In the house, it was already an ending. In the civil registry, it was still a bond.
I wrote to Daniel with my usual courteous urgency. The extinction of the bond was a procedure, not a sentence. The residence permit could be reconfigured without leaving me irregular. Daniel replied naturally. It was common. There was a path. What weighed on my body like an intimate mutation entered, for Daniel, into the normal order of paperwork.
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Then the document arrived through the electronic office. The name. The date. The seal. The word in capital letters: DECIDES.
I opened the PDF on my phone. The screen lit my face like a flashlight in the middle of a dark room. The file weighed nothing in my hand and, even so, it had enough body to change the status of a part of my life. It was the formal translation of an ending that had been happening silently for a long time. I let out my breath and locked the screen.
Within a few days, life turned into scans, PDFs, and folders with serious names. Registration certificate. Lease. Acknowledgment of receipt of the dissolution request. And finally, the formal resolution. The paper that said, in bureaucratic language, that what no longer existed in bed no longer existed for the State either.
Inside the house, the contrast was obscene. I was processing the end of one structure and the beginning of another with a lawyer, a calendar, and a case number. Camilo, one meter away in the same living room, was trying not to melt down while waiting for answers from an immigration website that crashed halfway through the form.
Mine was moving forward. Ours was not.