The first thing I remember is his breathing.
Not his voice.
Not his hands.
His breathing.
It was so quiet that for a long time I thought I was imagining it.
Barely a movement.
Barely an expansion beneath the fabric.
Barely a change in the air.
And yet I always ended up listening to it.
Always.
It did not matter what I was doing.
It did not matter what I was thinking.
Eventually my attention returned there.
To that rhythm.
To that calmness.
To that strange way of existing without effort.
I think that is where something began that I still do not know how to name.
Because I do not like being submissive.
I still reject the word.
I still feel an automatic resistance every time I see myself reflected in it.
But there is something else as well.
Something much harder to admit.
The need to remain.
Not to receive anything.
Not to be noticed.
Not to be used.
Simply to remain.
As if watching him move from one task to another had slowly replaced part of my own thoughts.
Sometimes I remember the exact pause between one breath and the next.
It is not long.
It is not even remarkable.
Most people would never notice it.
I do.
I know it.
I could recognize it among hundreds.
And that disturbs me.
Because it means I have spent too much time there.
Too much time watching.
Too much time remaining.
There are moments when I try to recover something resembling a separate identity.
I try to remember who I was before developing this quiet obsession.
And I find absurdly small fragments.
An opinion.
A habit.
A preference.
Then the image of his calm breathing returns.
And everything rearranges itself around it.
As if my mind had learned a different metric.
As if time had stopped being measured in hours.
And had begun to be measured in cycles of presence.
In moments of attention.
In the exact distance between one movement of his and the next.
Maybe that is what counting always meant to me.
Not the numbers.
Not the sequence.
Not the structure.
But the possibility of temporarily abandoning the responsibility of existing on my own.
Each number reducing the noise.
Each repetition narrowing the space available for my thoughts.
Each rhythm bringing me closer to that adjusted version of myself that exists only when I remain near his process.
I do not like it.
And yet I return.
I do not want it.
And yet I wait.
I do not choose it.
And yet I remain.
Until he is finished.
Until the final task is complete.
Until the last gesture disappears.
Until the last breath becomes indistinguishable from silence again.
Only then do I remember that I exist separately.
And every time it becomes a little harder to do so.
I have to move the neck I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
