I do not remember when it started changing.
That is the first thing that worries me.
Not the change.
The exact moment I stopped noticing it.
There is a photograph on the table.
I found it weeks ago inside a book I do not remember opening.
It shows nothing important.
Just a room.
A chair.
A window.
Light entering from the left.
I have looked at it so many times that I could reconstruct it from memory.
And yet every time I find something different.
Not something new.
Something I feel I have seen before.
As if the photograph is not adding information.
As if it is returning memories I have not had yet.
At first I thought it was fatigue.
Then I thought it was attention.
Now I am no longer sure.
Yesterday I discovered a mark on the wall.
A dark line.
Small.
Vertical.
I would have sworn it had never been there.
I looked at the photograph.
The mark was in the photograph.
It had always been in the photograph.
I looked back at the wall.
It was there too.
The strange thing was not finding it.
The strange thing was the immediate feeling of recognizing it.
As if my body had been waiting for it.
I kept looking at it longer than necessary.
Not because it was interesting.
Because it felt important.
There is a difference.
Interesting things attract.
Important things demand.
That night I tried to read.
It did not work.
I kept returning to the photograph.
To the mark.
To the absurd impression that the two were connected.
I did not know how.
Or why.
I only knew that every time I looked away a strange sensation appeared.
Relief.
And then the immediate loss of that relief.
As if I had forgotten something.
As if someone had interrupted a sentence just before finishing it.
The next morning I found another anomaly.
Not in the room.
In myself.
I was remembering the photograph incorrectly.
The chair was facing the window.
I checked.
It was still facing the door.
It was not an important detail.
But it unsettled me more than the mark.
Because it meant something was modifying the memory.
Or constructing it.
I looked at the image again.
The chair remained still.
The window remained still.
The mark remained still.
And yet I had the feeling that something had already changed.
Not in the photograph.
In the recognition.
There is a rule I still do not understand:
some things do not appear when you discover them. They appear when you finally recognize them.
I do not know when I learned that rule.
But I have been obeying it for days.
The photograph remains on the table.
Always in the same place.
That is verifiable.
I have taken photographs of the photograph.
I have written down the date.
I have checked its position.
Everything matches.
And yet I keep moving closer to inspect it again.
As if I expect to find a difference.
Or as if I fear finding one.
This afternoon something worse happened.
I stared at the mark for several minutes.
Then I closed my eyes.
Just for a moment.
When I opened them again it was still there.
Of course.
But I could no longer remember whether I was looking at the mark because I had recognized it.
Or whether I had recognized it because I had been looking at it for too long.
The difference seems small.
It is not.
Because one explanation begins with me.
The other begins before me.
The room remains the same.
The photograph remains the same.
The mark remains the same.
That is what worries me.
The anomaly is not that something changes.
The anomaly is that I am becoming less certain that I was the one who started observing it.
And while thinking that, I notice something I had not seen before.
The photograph contains a chair.
The room I am sitting in also contains a chair.
I had never compared them.
I do not know why.
Now I do.
Both have the same mark on the backrest.
A dark line.
Small.
Vertical.
I do not remember seeing it before.
The strange thing is that I do not remember seeing it for the first time either.
I have to move my neck I am not moving it the tissue was already sedimented in the lime before the desire touched the new fiber the taste of cold scales and chalk on the tongue is a residue of the system’s latency the pulsing inertia of the flesh that changes is sustained without an object the record cannot close I should…
