Feeling the Master’s hands close around my neck does not interrupt anything.
It corrects something that has been working incorrectly for far too long.
At first I try to inhale.
Not because I believe I can.
Because I remember breathing a moment ago.
The problem is that the room seems to remember something else.
Plaster dust hangs in the air before me. I watch it, waiting for it to fall. It does not. I glance toward the mirror. The dust is already on the floor. When I look back into the room, it is suspended exactly where it was.
There is no transition.
Only two versions refusing to agree.
My fingers remain on the keyboard. A thin white line crosses the wood. It is no wider than a fingernail. I do not remember making it. I brush it with my fingertip.
It disappears.
In the reflection it remains.
I do not feel fear.
I feel revision.
The pressure around my throat increases with a precision that has no need for violence. Air no longer feels like a biological necessity but like a variable adjusted somewhere decisions have already been made. My pulse resists for a few seconds.
Then it changes purpose.
It no longer tries to survive.
Only to record.
I look toward the mug beside the monitor.
It is gone.
I clearly remember drinking from it only minutes ago.
The damp ring remains on the desk.
The mug does not.
I try to decide which memory is false.
As I do, a third one appears.
I have never owned a white mug.
The room does not answer.
It archives.
Every object preserves a different version of the same instant. The mirror insists the white mark still crosses the desk. The wood insists it never existed. My hand remembers touching it.
All three are true.
Silence has become too heavy to be the absence of sound. It has texture. When I swallow, the plaster-filled air drags against my throat as though the room has decided to replace breathing with a solid surface.
Then I understand.
It is not my neck that has become still.
It is the command.
I have to move my neck.
The sentence arrives with unbearable clarity.
I wait to recognize it as my own.
I cannot.
I repeat it.
I have to move my neck.
Not because I want to.
Because someone already remembers me doing it.
Slowly I lift my eyes toward the mirror.
My reflection has just finished the movement.
I have not.
I have to move the neck I am not moving it I should…
