I do not remember when I stopped feeling the difference.
That should worry me more than it does.
There is a light switch on the wall.
Nothing special.
White.
Small.
Slightly yellowed around the edges.
I have been seeing it for weeks.
Maybe months.
I never paid attention to it.
Until yesterday.
Yesterday I pressed it.
The light went out.
Normal.
Expected.
I forgot about it immediately.
This morning I noticed it again.
And I had the strange feeling that I had pressed it many more times than I remembered.
Not over days.
Over years.
I kept staring at it.
Not because it had changed.
Because it looked tired.
I know that makes no sense.
Light switches do not look tired.
But that was exactly the sensation.
As if it had performed the same function too many times.
As if something had passed through it so often that it no longer distinguished one command from the next.
I tried to work.
It did not work.
Every few minutes I looked back at the wall.
The switch remained there.
Exactly the same.
That should have ended the unease.
It did not.
It increased it.
At dusk something small happened.
Something so small it hardly deserves to be mentioned.
I entered the room.
The light was on.
I am almost certain I left it off.
Almost.
Not completely.
That is what makes every explanation useless.
Memory always leaves an escape route.
I decided to take a photograph.
Just to end the feeling.
I photographed the switch.
The wall.
The date.
Everything.
Today I checked the image again.
And that is where the problem appeared.
Not in the switch.
In my memory.
Because the photograph shows exactly what I expected to find.
Yet it does not match what I remember photographing.
The position is correct.
The lighting is correct.
Everything is correct.
Too correct.
As if the image had been taken after I stopped looking at it.
I have checked the timestamp several times.
There are no errors.
The photograph exists.
The wall exists.
The switch exists.
The only unstable thing seems to be the sequence.
There is a rule I do not remember learning:
some things do not wear down from use. They wear down from being observed too many times.
Since then I keep checking it.
I walk past.
I look at it.
I keep moving.
Then I come back.
Not because I expect it to change.
Because I am beginning to suspect that I am the one changing every time I observe it.
This afternoon something worse happened.
Much worse.
I turned the light off.
Waited a few seconds.
Turned it back on.
Nothing unusual.
Except for one immediate sensation.
The feeling that the switch already knew what I was going to do.
It is not a pleasant idea.
Nor is it logical.
But it appeared before any thought.
As if my decision had arrived too late.
As if the gesture was already happening when I recognized it.
The room remains the same.
The wall remains the same.
The switch remains the same.
That is the disturbing part.
Because I am no longer trying to discover what is happening.
I am trying to understand why I keep checking.
And while thinking about that, I remember something.
The photograph I took yesterday has a timestamp.
10:14 PM.
I just checked it again.
It still says 10:14 PM.
Yet I am almost certain that yesterday, when I first looked at it, it said 10:17 PM.
Only three minutes.
I cannot prove anything.
I have no earlier screenshot.
No evidence.
Only an uncomfortable certainty.
I do not remember seeing the time change.
What I remember is feeling relief when it was still different.
And I do not know why that disturbs me far more than any change would.
I have to move my neck I am not moving it the excess was already sedimented in the lime…
