The strange thing is not losing words.
The strange thing is still having words and discovering that they no longer work.
For years I believed everything could be explained.
A conversation.
A desire.
A fear.
A disappointment.
Everything seemed reducible to a reasonable sequence of sentences.
I am no longer certain of that.
Because the more I think about it, the more I notice a separation.
The words continue arriving.
Yet the thing they attempt to describe remains motionless behind them.
Like a structure too large to pass through a doorway.
Sometimes I try to explain the obsession to myself.
I try to organize it.
Classify it.
Turn it into something understandable.
But every explanation seems to break apart before reaching its conclusion.
It is not obedience.
It is not pain.
It is not dependency.
It is not admiration.
It is none of those things individually.
Nor is it the sum of all of them.
It is something more difficult.
Something that seems to exist beneath names.
That is why I am becoming less interested in talking about what happened.
And more interested in observing what remains.
The waiting.
The stillness.
The sensation of clarity.
The way certain memories retain an impossible level of definition.
While others disappear.
I still remember the third red line.
The isolated one.
The one near the upper edge of the door frame.
I could draw it.
I could point to its exact position.
I could reconstruct the distance between it and the other two.
And yet I cannot explain why it remains.
That is what unsettles me.
Not the memory.
The clarity.
Because there are entire conversations I have forgotten.
People whose faces I barely remember.
Whole days reduced to shapeless fog.
Yet that line continues to exist.
As if it had been archived in a different part of memory.
As if it belonged to another category of reality.
Sometimes I think the obsession is not about returning.
It is about trying to solve a question that never fully forms.
A question that appears every morning.
While staring at the ceiling.
While walking down a street.
While listening to someone speak.
The same question.
Who was I before this began occupying so much space?
And the more I try to answer it, the more distant that person appears.
Not gone.
Not destroyed.
Simply far away.
Like a voice heard from another room.
While something else remains here.
Quieter.
More motionless.
Waiting.
Observing.
Remembering with impossible precision what should have been forgotten.
I have to move the neck…
