I like watching things being built
I see beauty in architecture, in structure
I love nature too, and the way in which it has an order
that we cannot comprehend or intellectualize
My name is Santiago
I am 36 years old
I am very tired
very tired for a young man
a little anxious too
Luckily, I can control that
I've always preferred girls to boys
but the first time that I saw Javier's strong jaw
I knew things were to change
His face was poetry to me
So many posters of him covered my wall
My mother hated this.
She used to say, "Get them out of here!"
"Get them out of here!"
Part of me thinks she resented my love for Javier
because she only ever respected actors in soap operas
She thought because they had to emote with great intensity
that this was far more difficult
considering how often the show played in a week
She felt that soap opera actors were able to convey the human experience
more accurately in a 20-minute episode
than movie stars could in 90 minutes
She was the opposite of a snob, my mother
In 1998, I was 17 years old
It was only a few weeks until summer
The temperature was slowly rising, the sky still gray,
but my passion: an inflamed, crimson red
This was the year I got into bodybuilding
My father was a bodybuilder, but this isn't why I got into it
My inspiration was Javier's characters, throughout the early nineties
His chiseled body and emotional performances
gave me a nuanced view of male sexuality
I realized-- sensitivity and strength
were not mutually exclusive
One year later, my feelings for him had intensified
and I had to meet him
On my 18th birthday
I waited outside his house for 16 hours
I got wasted to build up the courage
When he finally came out, he saw me and he looked right through me
as if I was a phantom
As if there was no connection, at all
As if he couldn't feel the heat of the fire within me
I was soul sick, I felt such shame
such a well of sorrow
I walked for miles, until I eventually came to the spot
where I had my first kiss
under a tree in La Glorieta Park
The whole world weighed on my well-shaped shoulders
I lifted hundreds of pounds of cast iron
but couldn't deal with the heavy, substantial grief
I was Romeo, bleeding
While I sat underneath the tree
I realized that when a human cannot love
they devolve and atrophy, just like a muscle
I came to understand that love is like nature
It grows, lives, and dies on its own accord