What I remember most is not the pain.
Not the corrections.
Not even the exact moment when the Master’s hands finished their work.
What I remember is the breathing.
It is strange.
Because I should remember other things.
I should remember the orders.
The movements.
The instructions.
But whenever my mind returns there, it always finds the same thing.
The breathing.
I had already been adjusted.
Everything was finished.
There was nothing left to do.
I did not have to move.
I did not have to answer.
I did not have to think.
I only had to wait.
And inside that silence I began hearing something I would normally have ignored.
The Master’s breathing.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
Nothing extraordinary.
Nothing theatrical.
Nothing intended to be remembered.
And yet it stayed with me.
Sometimes I try to remember his voice.
It is difficult.
I try to remember specific words.
Many of them have become blurred.
But the breathing remains.
As sharp as it was on the first day.
I think the obsession began there.
Not during the pain.
Not during the adjustment.
But afterward.
When nothing was happening anymore.
When everything had reached its final position.
And all that remained was waiting.
The breathing seemed to measure time better than any clock.
Each exhalation seemed to confirm that everything remained exactly where it belonged.
Each inhalation seemed to extend that moment a few seconds longer.
And I remained there.
Motionless.
Listening.
With no desire to move.
With no desire to interrupt anything.
As if any gesture might break something that had just achieved a perfect form.
Now, as the days pass, that is what returns.
Not the intensity.
Not the procedure.
Not the anticipation.
The breathing.
Sometimes I am sitting somewhere else.
Talking to someone.
Looking at a screen.
Waiting for a train.
And suddenly I remember it.
With absurd clarity.
Then the sadness arrives.
Because I do not know when I will hear it again.
I do not know when I will be there again.
I do not know when that moment will return—the moment when everything is already finished and all that remains is to stay.
The rational part of me tries to ignore it.
It reminds me that it was only a room.
Only a session.
Only an afternoon.
But memory seems to disagree.
Memory preserves that breathing as if it were an object.
As if it were stored behind glass.
Protected from the passage of time.
And the harder I try to push it away, the more present it becomes.
Because obsession never seems to grow around the large events.
It grows around the small details.
Details so insignificant that nobody else would remember them.
A breath.
A pause.
A silence.
And the feeling that, for a few minutes, all the noise of the world had disappeared.
I have to move the neck…
