Sometimes it appears at absurd moments.
Not when I am thinking about it.
Not when I am alone.
Not when I have time to analyze it.
It appears while I am standing in line.
While answering a message.
While trying to focus on something that should matter more.
And it always arrives the same way.
Not as a fantasy.
Not as an especially vivid image.
It arrives as a conclusion.
The simple and devastating idea of remaining in front of him until the end of his process.
Nothing more.
Doing nothing.
Proving nothing.
Becoming nothing.
Simply remaining.
Waiting.
Watching him reach the end.
The strange part is that I have never liked the idea of being submissive.
Even now the word feels foreign.
When I hear it applied to me, it creates a small automatic resistance.
As if someone were describing another person.
As if there were a mistake somewhere in the identification.
And yet that resistance lasts less and less.
Years ago I could maintain it for weeks.
Then for days.
Now sometimes it survives only a few minutes.
I wake up convinced that all of this is over.
I reason through it.
I analyze it.
I list perfectly valid arguments.
I do not want a dynamic to occupy so much mental space.
I do not want a future encounter to eclipse entire sections of ordinary life.
I do not want one experience to become a gravitational center.
The conclusion feels impeccable.
The feeling does too.
And then it happens.
Without transition.
Without permission.
My mind returns.
Not to him exactly.
Not even to a specific scene.
It returns to the process.
To that version of myself adjusted by him.
To that strange sensation of being exactly where I am supposed to be while something larger than me unfolds in front of me.
And everything else loses resolution.
Like a photograph slowly blurring around a single sharp point.
That is when the sadness arrives.
Not dramatic sadness.
Not despair.
Something far more difficult to explain.
The sadness of not understanding.
Because if I understood the reason, I could accept it.
Or reject it.
But I do not understand it.
I do not understand why a part of me keeps returning there.
I do not understand why the idea of remaining motionless while another person completes his process possesses more gravity than so many things that should matter more.
I do not understand why the anticipation of that ending seems to exert a stronger pull than ordinary life itself.
And the less I understand it, the more often it returns.
Sometimes I imagine that my mind is trying to solve a problem.
As if it discovered an unfinished equation during that first adjustment.
As if something hidden exists at the far end of the process.
Something it failed to identify.
That is why it keeps returning.
That is why it repeats.
That is why it insists.
It is not seeking pleasure.
It is not seeking punishment.
It is seeking an answer.
And it believes the answer exists there.
In front of him.
Waiting.
Meanwhile life continues.
Work.
Conversations.
Routines.
Responsibilities.
Everything still functions.
Yet sometimes I feel as though I am observing it all from very far away.
As if a growing part of my attention is already sitting in another room.
Waiting for something that has not happened yet.
For the Operator, hygiene is not the cleaning of surfaces.
It is the removal of interference.
Every scattered impulse.
Every contradictory movement.
Every thought that clouds the perfect reception of the mechanism.
Saturation becomes a process of filtration.
A state in which consciousness loses noise and gains density.
The subject ceases responding to a hundred different stimuli.
It begins responding only to what passes through every layer of resistance.
The gaze.
The voice.
The rhythm.
The process.
Perhaps that is what my mind keeps trying to recreate weeks before it happens.
The sensation of simplified attention.
The impossible experience of existence reduced to a single direction.
Outside of it everything multiplies.
Inside of it everything seems to organize itself.
And that difference is difficult to forget.
I do not want to be submissive.
I still think that.
I still say it.
Sometimes I even still believe it.
But I also know this obsession exists.
I know it returns.
I know it appears when it should not.
I know it occupies spaces that do not belong to it.
And I know that whenever it appears, it always takes me to the same place.
Not to the beginning.
Not to the most intense moment.
Not to the most spectacular memory.
Always to the ending.
To the persistent image of remaining there while the process reaches completion.
As if my mind were still convinced that, when it finally ends, I will understand something.
And as if until then I am incapable of stopping the wait.
The neck I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
