The Hour I Still Cannot Edit

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

The file is forty one minutes long and I have watched it maybe thirty times. I know where the good parts are. I know that at eleven minutes and twenty seconds the light in the room changes because a car goes past outside and the window goes from black to gray and back. I know that at nineteen minutes he laughs, and that it is the only time in the whole file that he laughs, and that I have never been able to make him do it again.

I have tried to edit it. That is the thing I am doing at four in the morning with a laptop and cold coffee. I have opened it in a program and put the cursor at the beginning and thought, cut the first four minutes, cut the part where I am standing in the doorway with my mouth open, cut the part where I count the money out loud because I was nervous. I have never actually cut anything. I close the program and I open the file again and I watch it from the start.

Watch the uncut tape of this scene → uncut angel of bogota journal, 18+

The file

It starts with the room. The shelf, the corner of the window, the bed with the bad sheet. He set the phone down and turned it and then his hand comes into the frame to adjust it, and you can see the gold ring, and then the hand goes away and there is nothing but the room for a long time. Eight seconds of room. Then the door opens and I come in.

I am younger in the file. Not by much, eight months, but it is there. I am wearing the jacket I still wear and I am doing the thing I do with my shoulders when I am trying not to look afraid. He says something off camera and I say something back and the sound is bad, all room and no voices, so I have to remember what we said. I remember. I remember all of it.

He comes into frame at four minutes and ten seconds. You never see his face. That was the rule and he kept it, even here, even in a file that nobody was supposed to see but him and me. You see his shoulder, his arm, the back of his neck, the shape of him moving around the room, and once, near the end, his hand on my chest, flat and wide and certain, with the ring catching the light from the window.

See what the camera actually caught → uncut angel of bogota journal, 18+

The sex is at twelve minutes. It is not the whole thing and it is not the best of it, because the camera is on a shelf and the bed is low and the angle is bad, but it is there, and I watch it the way you watch footage of a place you used to live. My own face, turned up, eyes closed. His back. The way my hand comes up and holds his forearm. The rhythm of it, which looks slower than it felt. The blanket sliding off the end of the bed and neither of us stopping to pick it up.

On the screen he has my knee up and his hand flat behind it, holding me open, and he is pushing in slowly, and I can see my own mouth open around a sound the microphone barely catches. I can see the exact moment the burn turns into something else, because my hand comes off the sheet and goes to his forearm and stays there. I know what that feels like. I can feel it now, sitting in this chair at four in the morning, the ghost of it, the deep pressure and the curve of him finding the same place over and over until my hips lift off the bed to meet him. The file does that to me. Eight months later and the file still does that to me.

The part I watch

The part I watch is not the sex. I want to be honest about that, since I am the only one who is ever going to read this.

Open the full Angel of Bogota episode → uncut angel of bogota journal, 18+

The part I watch is between fourteen and twenty two minutes. He has finished and he has dealt with the condom and he has come back and sat down on the edge of the bed, and I am lying on my back with the sheet over one leg and my arm over my eyes. And he sits there. He does not get dressed. He does not check his phone. He sits on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging down and he breathes, and after a while he turns his head and looks at me, and the camera sees the back of his head and the line of his jaw and nothing else, and he says something I have never been able to hear.

I have listened to that part with headphones. I have turned the volume all the way up and put the speaker against my ear. It is four syllables, maybe five, and it could be anything. It could be a question. It could be my name. It could be him telling me the time.

That is the hour I cannot edit. Not the hour of the room before I arrived, not the hour of the sex, but the eight minutes after, when a man who was paid to leave stayed sitting on the edge of my bed and looked at me like I was a thing he was trying to remember.

Stream the uncut version (18+) → uncut angel of bogota journal, 18+

I have not written to him. The number is still in my phone under a name that is not his name. I have typed messages and deleted them and once I typed three words and let them sit there for an hour and then deleted those too. What would I say. I have thought about it and the only true thing I could say is: I watched the file again, and you were sitting on the edge of the bed, and I still do not know what you said.

The angel of bogota does not answer questions. That was the rule from the first night. He leaves before anyone can ask him something he cannot answer, and I have spent eight months learning that the leaving is not the part that hurts. The part that hurts is that he sat down first.

At four in the morning the street is quiet and the laptop is hot and the coffee is finished. I am going to close the program now. I am going to watch it one more time, from the beginning, and this time I am going to listen properly, and maybe this time I will hear it. I know I will not. The angel of bogota said it once, into a bad microphone, in a rented room, at one in the morning, and then he got dressed and picked up his briefcase and left, and the file kept him.

The video behind this story → uncut angel of bogota journal, 18+

I keep him too. That is what this is. Everybody has a drawer where they keep the thing they cannot throw away, and mine is digital, and it is forty one minutes long, and there is one hour in it that I have never once been able to edit.