2018 · Christian Ives Solis
The symptom does not inaugurate anything: it leaves a record. The damage had already been happening. Everything else arrived late. My eyelid twitched. Stopped. Twitched again.
Not like a tic. Like a system log. A faulty LED at the corner of my face, lighting up precisely when I most needed to seem stable. Sometimes I would stand before the dark glass of my bedroom window and see myself there: face still, eye betraying me. The cold of the glass seeped into my forearm. Outside, the street always offered the same image: a solitary tree planted on the sidewalk and the city in motion, with rain falling in static mode, steady, repetitive, as if the world itself were caught in a loop.
That spasm was not emotion. It was telemetry. It was the body issuing a warning before I had permission to know it. Because stability is not a natural state; it is a protocol.
One morning, the phone rang.
It was Diego.
He was not shouting. That was exactly what made it more frightening. His voice came out fractured, as if he were trying to speak from inside a room where there was no longer enough air. I do not remember the exact phrase he used to break the silence. I remember the word: HIV.
I heard it, and the rest of the conversation lost signal. Pure static. Reflexively, I looked at the window. The tree remained there, still, and the city kept moving. I did not. I asked for the day off work. I closed my laptop without saving anything. I went down to the street with that strange feeling of stepping into a scene I still did not understand.
When Diego opened the door to his apartment, it was around ten in the morning. The first thing I saw was his face. He had always carried a kind of gentle sadness in it, something in the shape of his eyebrows, in the way his eyes opened when he was frightened, that made him look fragile even when he was fine. That day, that fragility had overflowed. The place was completely silent, and that was precisely why it felt worse.
At first, we did not say much. I held him, and he began to cry with the kind of crying that does not come from the chest: it comes from lower down, from some part of the body one does not know how to name. I cried with him. But only halfway. Trying to hold him up. Trying not to become one more thing he would have to hold together.
And while I was holding him, my mind began working on its own.
Not in emotions. In procedures.
Test. Where. When. What it means if it comes back one way. What it means if it comes back another.
There was panic, yes. But in me, panic always disguises itself quickly as logistics.