It is not the crop that returns to my thoughts when there are still weeks to go.
Not even the marks.
It is something much smaller.
The way he looks at them afterward.
Sometimes I am working, reading, or walking through a crowded street when the thought arrives without warning. It does not take over everything. It simply settles into a quiet corner of my mind. The image of his hands examining the result of something he had already decided long before it happened. The calm precision with which he seems to confirm that everything is exactly where it belongs.
And then I realize that I am not spending those days imagining intensity.
I am spending those days imagining the ending.
I imagine the moment when nothing remains to be done.
The tools set aside.
The room growing quiet.
His attention focused on details so small they would seem meaningless to anyone else.
The temperature of the skin.
The color of a line.
The way warmth remains trapped beneath the surface.
I do not fully understand what draws me to that.
If someone asked, I would probably struggle to explain it.
I do not think about pleasure.
I do not even think very much about myself.
What returns again and again is the feeling of being inside something he is building.
Accompanying him.
Watching him move from one step to the next with a logic that seems to exist entirely inside his own mind.
And knowing that, at a certain point, my task is finished.
All that remains is waiting.
Waiting while he observes.
Waiting while he decides.
Waiting while he adjusts small details that nobody else would ever notice.
There is something strangely comforting about that.
As though, for a few hours, the responsibility of interpreting myself simply disappears.
I do not have to decide what I feel.
I do not have to understand what I want.
I do not have to find explanations.
I only have to remain there.
Breathing.
Listening.
Waiting.
Sometimes I find myself imagining the aftercare before any other part.
The cool compress.
The slow movement of a hand spreading cream across the skin.
The almost invisible pause when he studies a mark before continuing.
The way the world seems to shrink into a sequence of simple, concrete actions.
Nothing dramatic.
Nothing spectacular.
Only steady attention.
And perhaps that is what remains.
Not the intensity.
Not the memory of tension.
But the stillness that arrives afterward.
The feeling that everything follows an order I do not need to fully understand.
There are moments when I catch myself thinking about it for days.
Not as restless obsession.
Not as anxiety.
More like a stone resting at the bottom of a river.
Always present.
Always still.
The idea that somewhere ahead there is a moment when everything will be arranged exactly as he wants it.
And when that moment arrives, I will not have to do anything extraordinary.
I will not have to become anything.
I will not have to prove anything.
I will simply be there in front of him.
Waiting.
While his attention moves slowly across the smallest details.
While the world becomes quiet.
While breathing settles into a rhythm that no longer feels entirely my own.
And while calm slowly takes the place of every question.
I have to move the neck I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
