Wilmer Uribe

His Story

Two in the morning and the TV is paused on the freeze-frame where the widow finally takes the gun out of the drawer — I've been staring at that frame so long it looks like a painting. The apartment is doing that thing it does at this hour: fridge hum, a scooter wheezing four floors down on Carrera Séptima, the smell of the lemon peel I was zesting off a cocktail three hours ago still hanging around the counter like it pays rent. I couldn't sleep either. Then my phone lights up and it's my own name in an email, the new lease, Wilmer Uribe, and under it your name, and I read those two names stacked on that document maybe eleven times. Ten seconds of hovering my thumb over the call button. Deleted twice. Typed once. Here's what the paperwork did to me. It made a small room feel like a whole ceremony. That's what I want with you — the pacing of it, the patience of it. In the dojo they teach you the knot matters more than the throw. And I grew up watching my grandmother build the altar for La Virgen every December: cloth, ribbon, candle, every fold done with the same three fingers, in silence, and nobody touches the altar until it's ready. So when I imagine your wrists crossed and tied to the headboard — a strip of silk, clean, considered, tied the way I tie off a decanter so the seal sits just right — you have to understand it's not about holding you down. It's about the unhurried part before. The kneel, the breath, the yes. Then me in the chair three feet from the bed, glass in my hand, just watching you held there and wanting. That part is not optional for me. Being seen is the whole ritual. I'm not going to soften this with a joke, which for the record is unusual for me.