The gaze was already there before I raised my head.
That is not a metaphor.
I know because I found the record first.
The observation came later.
There was a crack running through the lime-coated wall. Nothing unusual. Yet when I moved closer, I discovered something impossible: someone had written down the exact direction of my next eye movement.
I had not looked there yet.
And still, the note existed.
At first I assumed it was coincidence.
Then I found another one.
And another.
The fourth described a blink that had not happened yet.
I do not remember when I started associating those markings with the Master’s eyes.
Perhaps it was when I noticed my posture changing before he entered the room.
Perhaps it was when I realized my body seemed to learn about his attention several seconds before I did.
The observation did not begin when he looked at me.
It began when I suspected he might.
The lime room behaved like an archive.
It did not store images.
It stored anticipations.
Every crack seemed to contain a slightly advanced version of my reactions.
Every shadow knew a response I had not yet produced.
I found a tiny inscription near the northern wall.
You have already tried to avoid this gaze.
I did not remember doing so.
I kept reading.
Farther down was another note.
Next time you will try to hold it.
The date was earlier.
That should have been impossible.
I tried to construct an explanation.
I failed.
Because the more closely I studied the signs, the clearer it became that surveillance was not the problem.
Memory was.
I began to suspect that the Master’s eyes were not recording my behavior.
They were recording my discrepancies.
The distance between what I had done and what I remembered doing.
Then the anomaly arrived that transformed all the previous ones.
A message written in the same lime dust as the wall:
The blink already happened.
I raised my hand toward my face.
I did not remember blinking.
But I could no longer prove that I had not.
For several minutes I searched for the familiar sentence.
The one that always appeared at the end.
The one announcing the unfinished movement.
It was gone.
I checked the wall.
I checked the floor.
I returned to the beginning.
Nothing.
Its absence became heavier than any presence.
Only then did I discover a final inscription.
It was not at the end.
It was at the beginning.
As though it had been waiting there before I opened the record.
You begin to worry about the sentence when it no longer needs you.
And for the first time the question stopped being who was watching.
The question became something else.
If the surveillance had vanished…
why was I still behaving as though I were being observed?
I have to move my neck the record cannot close I should…
