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July 2024 · Christian Ives Solis
RECORD XXVII — July 2024: social hinge
When July arrived, so did the social hinge. Camilo, Estela, and I went out trying to recover some air, as if walking together down the street might be enough to keep the house from feeling like a paperwork office. Sara, Diego, and Carlota joined us. A cigarette was slowly burning on the edge of a planter out on the street. No one was smoking it. It just stayed there, turning to ash on its own.
We went into a bingo hall with cards spread across the tables and blue lights overhead. For a while, it was fun in a small way. I was relaxed. That was when I made the mistake of letting my guard down.
They asked about Camilo. I answered from the inside. I said I understood the stress of papers, that life under someone else’s decision where “no” remains a constant shadow. I said that my way of functioning was different: fear exists, but the only thing that saves you is to follow the process, meet the deadlines, and not let panic devour you ahead of time.
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I said it carefully. And then Carlota inhaled with that surgical calm of someone about to say something irreversible. She held the sentence in the mouth for a second before releasing it, as if measuring the damage exactly. And then she let it out:
—It’s just that I think you don’t love Camilo enough.
The cold went straight up my spine in one line. Shame came attached right behind it.
Not only because of the sentence, but because of the table, the bingo cards, the blue lights, that public format where something stops being an intimate conversation and turns into a verdict. The bingo caller kept talking in the background through the microphone, oblivious to everything. Sara tried to provide context, to soften it. But it was already done. The scene had reordered itself: me in the center, everyone else evaluating me with the gaze of an ethics committee.
That was when I understood that I had just lost my chosen family. The place where I believed I did not have to pretend had just asked me for my credential to enter. Under the table, Estela’s hand found mine and squeezed my fingers hard. That minimal, tactile gesture gave me permission not to explode. It did not erase the sentence, but it told me something essential: I saw what just happened.
I came home with the wound pulsing beneath my shirt. On the way back, the equation assembled itself in my head: a sentence like that does not arrive by chance. I waited for Camilo to get home from work and told him immediately, there in the living room. As living fact. This happened. This went through me.
His response was correct in the abstract and devastating in the physics of the present:
—I can’t make myself responsible for what other people say.