Santiago, Chile
If I wanted to understate things, I'd say that Chile was a bit of a blur.
Part of me had hoped to get a little further afield than backpacking in the Americas, but Lydia had loved what I'd sent back from Colombia and wanted more like it, so we arranged for me to spend most of February working around Santiago. Not that it took much for her to twist my arm into visiting a place I'd wanted to see since I was a kid in 8th-grade Spanish class, nursing a formative queer crush on my Chilean teacher. And professionally it somehow managed to be more than I hoped, as I attempted to throw a spotlight on the city itself rather than the Andes and surrounding country - a riot of concrete and glass splintered up through the mountains, climbing over the old colonial shell. I took my time wandering the different barrios, from the towering edifices of wealthy El Golf, to the diversity of Patronato, and the hot swathes of color painted across the city, through Bellavista and Yungay. I was managing to still insist to myself that whatever else was going on in my life, my photography wasn't going to suffer and somehow I managed to stick to that, fighting the distractions to take photos that stand well enough alongside any others I've taken.
But god, after Gabi and Luisa did I let myself get distracted.
I slept with more women in my first week in the country than I'd done in my entire life up to that point, some better remembered than others; a succession of wet lips and warm, olive-skinned bodies, sweltering beneath ceiling fans in the lurid summer heat.
There was the manager of my hotel; and the street artist, selling paintings a couple of blocks over, who practically needed to be dissuaded from burying her face between my legs right there on the sidewalk. The owner of the tiny bookshop tucked away in the quaint Barrio Italia, her curses as pretty as the district's streets; and the shy girl on the bus who turned wild the moment she had her third glass of merlot. I was even brave enough to test out a latin dance class at the recommendation of one of my hookups. And, while I ended up sharing a bed with two of my fellow students in the following weeks, it was the teacher who cornered me after my first session, feeling like something teenage fantasy as she peeled the sports bra away from her dark chest and fucked me possessively on the studio floor until she gushed. I'm pretty sure I barely slept, and after a few days my time there began to feel like a fever dream of work and sex, blistered in patches across my memory.
There was one day in particular however, somewhere in the middle of it all, that stands out more than the others, even if I didn't quite understand the little ways it would come to shape me at the time, or how a single picture I took that afternoon would change my life months later. But it started with me finally managing to video call with Anton.
It's odd which little things stick with you. I can barely remember the name of the girl who was still sleeping in the 'modern,' whitewashed bedroom of my Airbnb apartment, but I can vividly recall the taste of the Brazilian coffee that, in hindsight, was probably the one thing still keeping me on my feet. I'd taken my Macbook out onto the balcony as I nursed the drink, enjoying the brief period where the sun was up but the breeze was still cool and with the Andes visible in the distance, through the gaps between the tower blocks, I listened to Anton's voice through an earbud in one ear, and the sounds of the city with the other. There were two things we had connecting us. One was Alice, but she was easy, and it was the second, looming personality that I was calling to discuss.
"Wait...hold on a second Riley," a boyish face filled my screen, a look of amusement quirking at the jawline he'd still not quite grown into in response to something I'd said. "You're making it sound like Harvey's a 'she.'"
"Sure, given everything, why is that the weird part?" I asked.
We'd only just started talking, and I'd made a point of trying to hint at my pronouns for Harvey almost as soon as the pleasantries were out of the way, having worked out that the bracelet manifested subtly differently for each of us and hoping it would go some way to breaking the ice. I'd spent weeks putting all sorts of weight on the conversation and now it was here I was desperately attempting to make it feel as casual as humanly possible, the same reason why I'd pulled my bare feet up onto the seat alongside me as if my body could be tricked into thinking it was relaxed. Anton gave a thoughtful look, framed in soft focus by Alice's living room, the reminder of their relationship feeling both a world away yet still bruising. I don't do homesick, but it felt a little more loaded than I expect he had intended.
"I don't suppose it is," he said after considering his reply. "It's just I spent months with him and hadn't even thought about the idea that he might be able to change his voice."
"Her voice. Sexist much?" I joked, perfectly deadpan, hoping that Alice's claims about how similar our senses of humor could be weren't over-exaggerated. It took him a moment to catch on, but when he did he gave one of the easy laughs that my best friend had fallen for. Or been made to fall for, I still wasn't completely sure.
"It does make sense. He-"
"She."
"He,"
Anton emphasised, pushing back against my interruption with a small grin of his own, "did make a point of trying to explain to me once how a lot of what I was hearing was being manifested through my subconscious. He insisted that he had his own personality, but I never did quite figure out how much was coming from the bracelet and how much was coming from me."
The more he spoke the more I could see why Alice would like him. He looked every inch a college sophomore, with dark features originating from the Caucasus that even I could tell were going to be objectively handsome the moment they stopped seeming youthfully ill at ease with themselves. But there was a quiet, intense maturity to how carefully he spoke and, even having had Harvey's help, the intelligence behind his brown eyes came out with a shyness that made him seem warm rather than arrogant. Apparently, he'd dropped out of law school shortly before meeting Alice and was going back to university in the fall to study nursing instead, and it was hard not to see the idealism in him.
My cynicism was one of the few things we didn't share it seemed.
"What does he sound like for you then," Anton asked, with both of us seeming to accept that we were each going to refer to Harvey however felt natural and allow the size of the bracelet's personality to do away with any ambiguity.
"A bit like Charlize Theron with a hint of Emily Haines from Metric," I replied, doing my best not to roll my eyes when I saw his blank look and realised he was too young to have heard of the act I'd spent my own college life obsessing over. "Seriously? They're a band from Toronto. You?"
"Clooney."
It was my turn to laugh at how obvious that was. Of course, that was how Harvey sounded to a kid like him, full of casual, hetero assurance. "Ok, yeah, I definitely got the better deal there."
A sound from inside the apartment drew a flicker of my attention, my lover from the night before awake and moving. It wasn't much, but it was enough for me to glance down at the silver looped around my wrist, reminding me of the half dozen questions I knew needed to be asked and that Harvey, somewhere in the back of my head, could doubtlessly hear intolerably loudly. I pretended to pluck at one at random but knew it was the thing I'd wondered the most since this had started.