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May 2024 · Christian Ives Solis
RECORD XXV — May 2024: Estela and automatism
May arrived with the weight of the inevitable: more decisions, less space. Estela stopped being a possibility in the air and became a material plan. An extra key and an arrival date.
We had an available room that functioned as an improvised closet. I liked that open order, but clearing it out revealed the deeper truth: the house was still being assembled in fragments, with stacked boxes and an unpacked suitcase. Once it became clear that Estela was going to move in, I did not feel it as “bringing someone in.” I felt it as opening a floodgate. Another migrant biography entering a perimeter already saturated with invisible paperwork and managed breathing.
Estela was coming from a hard collapse. Fifty-four years old, undocumented, cleaning houses outside Barcelona. Her presence brought economic relief for the rent. But relief also has weight when it is injected into a flat already operating at its limit. The agreement was clean: shared expenses, one room, and a temporary bridge toward Sant Celoni. I asked Estela directly, face to face, to make sure I would still be able to breathe within that pact.
Meanwhile, Daniel’s folder kept growing thicker. At the end of May, Daniel sent me the case number for my change of residence status. A cold figure functioning like a rope. Something to hold on to when the environment turned to mud.
Shortly afterward, I sat for the nationality exam. That test where you prove you know which king did what. That same day, my body was already off. I had fallen while skating, gone to urgent care, and my knee was throbbing under a tight bandage. I was walking strangely, dosed up on ibuprofen. And even so, I sat down and took the exam anyway. It was not bravery. It was pure automatism. The hardware was damaged, but the Operator kept pushing the machine so it would perform.
I did not tell Camilo. I did not want to release another alarm into a house already living in perpetual vigilance. I kept the “Pass” to myself, the way one keeps a match when one knows the air is full of gas.
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PROTOCOL: If the body fails on a paperwork day, pain is postponed; the procedure is not.
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NOTE — Hallway, 03:00 AM
The sound of the shower runs out of time in the middle of the night. Estela walks toward the kitchen trying not to make noise. Camilo turns over in bed and, still asleep, reaches for my hand. I give it to him, but I stay awake, staring at the ceiling. There are now three bodies breathing the same air in a counted number of square meters. The decision to take Estela in was the right one. It was the minimum in the face of a system that would otherwise leave Estela on the street. But the migrant safety net is always paid for with intimacy. The cost of the rent becomes lighter, but the boundary required to be a couple disappears. We stop being a refuge and become administrators of a shelter.
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