For a long time I believed the word existed to stop something.
Now I suspect it existed to prove that there was still something left to stop.
The difference seems small.
It is not.
It is the kind of difference that appears at four in the morning when someone opens the refrigerator without being hungry and stands staring at the interior light for too long.
The mechanism is still there.
The possibility is still there.
The word remains intact.
What has begun to disappear is something else.
The evidence that it was ever necessary.
That is what unsettles me.
Not the pressure.
Not the density.
Not even the compaction.
What unsettles me is that it becomes harder and harder to reconstruct the version of myself who would have used the code.
I try to imagine that person.
I study them the way one studies photographs of a dead relative.
I recognize the features.
I recognize the voice.
I recognize certain ridiculous habits.
The tendency to leave half-empty glasses on tables.
The habit of rereading old messages.
The compulsion to check twice whether the door was locked.
And yet something refuses to fit.
I cannot reconstruct the gravity that once held those elements together.
The word remains stored somewhere in memory.
I can still pronounce it.
That is the strange part.
I have not forgotten it.
What I have forgotten is the geography surrounding it.
Like keeping a key after the house has disappeared.
Like remembering a telephone number belonging to a city that no longer exists.
Like finding a grocery list written in your own handwriting and no longer understanding who needed those things.
Milk.
Batteries.
Aluminium foil.
The list appears perfectly rational.
The person who wrote it becomes increasingly incomprehensible.
I am beginning to suspect that the compaction never occurred where I thought it did.
It did not occur in the will.
Nor in the body.
Nor even in desire.
It occurred in the space of possibilities.
In the distance between one option and another.
In the ability to imagine alternative arrangements of reality.
There used to be multiple trajectories.
Now there are memories of trajectories.
Those are not the same thing.
There is a contradiction I am embarrassed to admit.
I keep telling myself that I still possess a choice.
Yet choice is beginning to resemble those objects that remain untouched inside a drawer for years.
Technically they still function.
Practically they belong to another world.
Sometimes I try to remember what it felt like to think about the outside.
I do not find an emotion.
I find noise.
Fragments.
A traffic light in the rain.
The smell of warm dust behind an old computer.
A folded bill inside a book.
The vibration of a phone I no longer own.
Remnants.
Only remnants.
As though someone archived the coordinates while preserving only the physical evidence that they once existed.
And then an unpleasant thought appears.
Perhaps the true function of the code was never to protect me from the mechanism.
Perhaps it was to protect the memory of a different cartography.
To keep alive the hypothesis that things could be arranged differently.
Not to guarantee an exit.
To guarantee the conceptual existence of an exit.
And that is far more fragile.
Because the word is still there.
Perfectly preserved.
Perfectly operational.
What is deteriorating is the world toward which it pointed.
A little more every day.
With an almost bureaucratic slowness.
Until one eventually finds oneself holding a flawless key before a door one no longer remembers ever seeing.
The word vibrates in the throat like a fuse that no one wants to blow the will measures the lime flow while the pressure seeks the perfect fit angle the register remains stable at the point where the code ensures that fixedness is a technical choice the agency flow compresses into the vertebra that has decided to be a foundation under its own supervision I cannot move the base of my skull the mechanism has welded the atlas with the axis respecting the safety threshold that I manage myself with silence I should…
