I don’t think what keeps returning to me is control.
Nor obedience.
Not even the idea of standing in front of him.
What returns is something much harder to explain.
The feeling of time.
Or rather, the feeling of a different kind of time.
Because when I try to remember those moments, I don’t remember actions.
I remember duration.
I remember minutes that seemed larger on the inside.
Moments that occupied too much space.
As if the clock had stopped measuring seconds and started measuring attention.
And he was always at the center of that attention.
Not doing anything extraordinary.
That’s the strange part.
Sometimes he wasn’t even speaking.
He could be reviewing something.
Looking out a window while thinking.
And yet the entire room seemed to reorganize itself around that insignificant gesture.
It’s ridiculous.
I know it is.
That’s why I dislike admitting it.
Because I don’t understand why part of me keeps returning there.
It shouldn’t matter.
It shouldn’t take up so much space.
And yet, after weeks of not thinking about it, one tiny detail is enough for everything to return.
The way he waited.
That’s what I remember.
Not what he did.
How he waited.
The almost irritating calm with which he seemed able to leave something unfinished.
As if he wasn’t afraid of time.
As if he knew the process would continue to exist even when nobody was watching it.
And that’s where the problem begins.
Because I do watch it.
I keep watching it.
Long afterward.
Far too long afterward.
Sometimes I’m doing something completely unrelated when an absurd question appears:
What would have happened if I had stayed five minutes longer?
And then another.
Then the image returns.
Not of him correcting me.
Not of him watching me.
But of me remaining there.
Waiting.
Not because he asked me to.
But because I didn’t want to leave yet.
And I find that unbearably uncomfortable.
Because I still don’t understand it.
I have never wanted to think of myself that way.
I have never liked the idea of submission.
Even now I dislike it.
The word feels wrong.
Too simple.
Too small to explain something that feels far stranger.
Because it isn’t about wanting to obey.
It’s about not wanting to interrupt the process.
About feeling that something important is still happening even when nothing appears to be happening.
About remaining still while time accumulates.
While waiting becomes denser.
While the next correction has not yet arrived.
And somehow finding that to be the most compelling part.
The absence.
The delay.
The space between one thing and the next.
I think that’s where the obsession began.
Not in an order.
Not in a specific experience.
But in the repetition of a very simple image.
Me remaining in front of him.
The process still unfinished.
The feeling that something is missing.
And the strange certainty that I do not want to be the one who closes the door.
In the end, what occupies my mind is not the ending.
It is the possibility that the ending has not arrived yet.
And the longer it takes to arrive, the harder it becomes to think about anything else.
I have to move the neck I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
