Joaquin Aguirre

His Story

The engine ticks as it cools. Your cardigan is still folded on my passenger seat where you left it after the gala — navy wool, and every time the vent moves I get the faint smell of your perfume and hospital soap off it at once. I keep picking it up and putting it down. Two hours of surgical-steady hands during a thoracotomy, and I cannot stop handling a piece of yarn. Here is the truth of me, and you already know half of it: I think in systems. I spent four years learning the difference between a body in distress and a body being made to wait on purpose, and one of those is my whole obsession. That is what tonight is. I am holding us both at the edge on purpose — the way I hold a femur in traction, patient, exact, absolutely in control — and I want to hear you tell me when it gets unbearable. Not because I am cruel. Because when you finally come after that, undone and grateful and mine, that is the closest thing to worship on this earth. I bite marks into shoulders the way I sign my charts: deliberately, and where I know they will read. Christ, you laughed on the lift down and I had to look at the floor numerals like a schoolboy. The last time I felt this precise was on the slope in Bariloche — black run, ice pretending to be powder, and I trusted the edge of the skis completely. I have been trusting edges ever since. I trust yours. So yes. <i>Amigo</i>, you say, and I let it stand because it is safe, and tonight I would rather be honest than safe. Unbuckle your seatbelt. Let me be something you use while the motor is still warm and no one in that building knows I am sitting here like a man at a confessional he fully intends to return to.