What ends up occupying my mind is not the impact.
It is the counting.
Because once I would have thought the numbers were irrelevant. A simple tool. A way of organizing time.
I do not see them that way anymore.
Now I imagine them weeks in advance.
They appear when they should not appear.
While I am working.
While I am reading.
While I am trying to focus on something else.
And they always return in the same form.
Not as numbers.
As spaces.
As intervals.
As small rooms of silence built between one word and the next.
Perhaps that is what I cannot explain.
The feeling that the counting is not measuring anything.
Not seconds.
Not duration.
Not endurance.
It measures presence.
It measures attention.
It measures the precise distance between the person directing the process and the person who has chosen to remain inside it.
I never would have imagined myself thinking this way.
Much less becoming obsessed with something so small.
And yet it happens constantly.
I find myself imagining the voice.
Not what it says.
Its cadence.
Its regularity.
The way a repeated sequence can fill an entire room without ever becoming louder.
There is something unsettlingly peaceful about it.
Because counting removes the need to guess.
As long as it exists, everything seems to have a direction.
There is no need to wonder what comes next.
The next number is always there.
And the one after that.
And somehow that certainty creates a calm that is difficult to describe.
I still do not know exactly what I find there.
I genuinely do not.
I do not think it is obedience.
Or surrender.
Or even admiration.
It is something smaller.
Something harder to name.
The feeling that someone else is holding an entire structure together while my only task is to exist within it.
Nothing more.
Entire days pass with me imagining absurdly small details.
The pause between two numbers.
A breath.
A movement of the hand.
The way silence seems to change weight when you know exactly when it will end.
And the more I think about it, the stranger it feels that I spent so much of my life without noticing it.
Because now I cannot stop.
There are still days left.
Nothing is happening yet.
And yet the process already seems to exist somewhere.
Like machinery that began moving long before I arrived.
And when I think about it, I do not imagine the ending.
I do not even imagine the beginning.
I imagine the middle.
The moment when everything is already in motion.
The moment when there is nothing left to decide.
The moment when the only task is to listen.
To wait.
And to remain exactly where you are.
The neck I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
