The first time Sade thought about verifying himself, he was not writing.
He was not searching for an idea.
The table was there.
So was the ink.
Dry. Too dry.
As if it had stopped participating in what was happening in the room.
The door was closed.
The sound of the hallway behind it.
Simple things.
Things that did not respond.
Sade looked at them as if they could confirm something.
He did not know what.
Only that they had to remain what they were.
The table.
The ink.
The door.
For a few seconds, it worked.
Everything stayed where it should be.
That should have been enough.
It wasn’t.
Because what was strange was not that things were in place.
What was strange was that he needed to check twice.
With no clear reason.
No prior error.
As if the checking had arrived before the doubt.
That was the first fracture.
It was not reality that was failing.
It was the moment he decided to look at it.
Sade stopped doing it for three days.
He did not leave.
He did not change anything.
He simply stopped checking.
And for a brief, unbearable period of normality, it worked.
The table remained a table.
The door kept enclosing the same space.
The mirror did nothing a mirror should not do.
That was the most disturbing part.
That reality seemed more stable without him.
Until he found a note in a drawer.
Written in his handwriting.
Dated three days earlier.
“Do not trust the moment you think it has ended.”
He did not remember writing it.
But he recognized the sentence.
That was worse.
Because now checking was no longer an act.
It was a continuation.
There was no clear beginning to stop at.
The problem was not confirming existence.
That was easy.
A reflection.
A sound.
A moving hand.
All of that could be falsified as proof.
The difficult part was something else.
Confirming that the person seeking the proof was the same person who needed it.
For a second he thought that explained everything.
Then he understood that “explaining” was just another form of checking.
And then the sentence appeared.
Not as a decision.
As interference.
I have to make sure I am still the one who checks.
He stopped.
Not because he understood it.
But because he did not know whether he had thought it.
Or whether the sentence had arrived first.
I have to move my neck I am not moving it I should…
