There is something particularly embarrassing about discovering that the Master appears precisely when he should not appear.
Not during solemn moments.
Not during fantasies.
Not during reading.
He appears when I have spent forty minutes lying in bed watching videos I do not care about.
Videos about things I will never buy.
Someone restoring an old machine.
A man cleaning a carpet.
A train crossing a city I will probably never visit.
None of it has anything to do with him.
Nothing.
And yet, at some point, attention breaks.
The image keeps moving.
The sound continues.
But something is no longer watching the video.
Something is thinking about the Master.
Not dramatically.
That would be easier.
He arrives in a much worse way.
Smaller.
More intimate.
Harder to remove.
I wonder how he would have raised an eyebrow at the amount of time I am wasting.
I imagine the silence he would have chosen.
I imagine the feeling of being observed without actually being observed.
Then I return to the video.
For a few seconds.
Perhaps a minute.
Then he returns again.
Not because I want him to.
Because he remains.
Sometimes it happens before sleep.
I am adjusting a pillow.
Trying to find a comfortable position.
Thinking about absolutely nothing.
And then that circular mark returns.
Not the physical mark.
That disappeared long ago.
I remember it.
I remember exactly where it was.
I remember its shape.
I remember the strange color it carried for days afterward.
I remember looking at it in a mirror.
I remember looking away.
I remember looking again.
And the more I try to understand why I still remember it, the less I understand.
And the less I understand, the more space it occupies.
There are nights when I find myself replaying entire conversations that never happened.
Hypothetical sentences.
Imagined corrections.
Observations he perhaps never would have made.
As if part of my mind has built an imperfect replica of him and decided to keep it running twenty-four hours a day.
The problem is that the replica learns.
It becomes more accurate.
More invasive.
More silent.
Sometimes I am preparing food.
Cutting something unimportant.
An onion.
A tomato.
Bread.
And suddenly I catch myself wondering whether the Master would have considered the precision of the cut sufficient.
It is ridiculous.
Completely ridiculous.
No normal person thinks things like that.
I know this while it is happening.
And it continues happening.
That is the truly uncomfortable part.
It is not ignorance.
It is coexistence.
I remember one particularly absurd afternoon.
A woman was waiting for a bus.
She wore a dark blue coat.
There was a small white stain on her left sleeve.
Nothing else.
Nothing happened.
She never even spoke.
But I watched her for a few seconds because she seemed to be waiting for something important.
And somehow I ended up thinking about him.
I do not know how the transition happened.
There is no logic.
There is no connection.
It simply happened.
The way everything happens now.
The Marquis de Sade wrote about bodies.
About systems.
About obsessions.
But the unsettling thing is not discovering those ideas in books.
The unsettling thing is discovering that certain obsessions continue working when the books are closed.
When the room is empty.
When nothing is happening.
Especially when nothing is happening.
Because that is where he remains.
And the more time passes, the harder it becomes to call it memory.
Memories stay still.
This does not.
This keeps growing.
I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
