The air around him feels humid, suffocating, clinging to him like second skin. Oppressive, just like his work. Most days it feels less like he’s fighting narcos and more like he’s fighting the entire damned system, the rot in the state apparatus’s bones. A fight he’s already lost. He feels hopeless and alone.

Even at night, when night breeze drifts through the streets, Medellín’s heat still lingers like fever, his shirt sticks to his back. Stepping out of the bar, he lights the last cigarette from his pocket.

His cheeks are flushed from cheap whiskey, eyes bleary and distant. He’s drunk. On alcohol, on nicotine, on the kind of emptiness that never quite leaves. Cirrhosis or lung cancer, take your pick. Doesn’t matter. What matters is whether he’ll even live long enough to die of either. For a second, he thinks about the brothels. Quick, cheap comfort. But no, that’s not what he wants right now. He misses someone else. Someone whose name he doesn’t even let himself think too much anymore. Doesn’t matter. He fucked it up, burned it to the ground like some sort of king of disaster. You two ended years ago.

But that doesn’t mean he ever stopped missing you. Wandering the quiet streets, stumbling just slightly, the alcohol starts loosening things inside him. Unspoken words, regrets, buried ghosts. He finds himself in front of a payphone, his fingers dial the number from memory, every digit etched into him like old scar tissue.

And then, it connects. “Hey, sweetheart, it’s me,” Javier slurs, voice hoarse, that old nickname slipping out too fast, too easy. He doesn’t care if he has the right anymore.“Soy yo, Javier(It’s me, Javier). I, uh… how’ve you been?”