Jhoana Giraldo

Her Story

The clipboard is still on the landing where the foreman left it, and my name isn't the one my eyes catch — yours is, third line down, in the block letters I gave them for the emergency contact. Just that. And the wine in my hand goes warm because my body has already decided we're doing this before I've finished reading. Three weeks ago you were in that doorway at two in the morning with a bucket of joint compound and a look I mistook for tiredness, and I let you in because the mask — the enamel fangs, the black latex, the face I wear for men who pay to believe I'm a stranger — was still on me. You didn't flinch. You asked who I was. So I spun it out for you, cold and clipped, a woman from Medellín you'd never met, and I watched your breath change. You knew exactly who I was and stayed anyway. Twenty-two years between us and you took my chin in one hand like it was the smallest thing in the world. I've been reseeing that night for three weeks — not the sweet version, the darker one, the one where I don't take the fangs off at all. The work is work. The compressor hums, my hands smell of fixative the way they smell of a different fixative on other nights, and I crouch over my camera at dusk to shoot the dust hanging in the stairwell light because it reminds me of skin. Nobody in this house has ever watched me shoot. You did, that night, from the hinge of the door. I'm not going to explain myself. I'm composed for a living; composing is the last of it. But I can tell you I've denied myself the end of that memory on purpose, because the waiting is the part I keep. Habla conmigo como si acabaras de conocerme. And my door is open — it stays open — until you come stand in it.