I found a cane in a photograph I don’t remember taking.
It wasn’t in the center of the image.
It didn’t even seem important.
It was leaning against a wall.
Almost outside the frame.
I looked at it for a few seconds.
Then I moved on to other photographs.
Half an hour later I returned to the same image.
Not because I was interested in the cane.
Because I had forgotten why I came back.
The wall felt familiar.
The window too.
The cane did not.
I opened an old folder.
Inside was a note.
It wasn’t dated.
It simply said:
“The cane came later.”
I didn’t understand what it meant.
I kept searching.
I found another note.
Written in the same handwriting.
“The cane came first.”
The two statements seemed incompatible.
I placed them side by side.
For several minutes I tried to decide which one was false.
Then a worse possibility appeared.
Maybe neither was describing the same event.
Maybe they referred to two different beginnings.
That night I found something I don’t remember creating.
A folder called:
“POSTURE”
Inside were twenty-seven photographs.
All of empty rooms.
In some of them there was a cane.
In others there wasn’t.
I tried to arrange them chronologically.
I couldn’t.
The dates seemed displaced.
As if someone had rearranged them afterward.
Or beforehand.
In photograph number sixteen I noticed something strange.
A shadow.
It didn’t belong to the cane.
It didn’t belong to any piece of furniture.
It didn’t belong to any visible person.
The shadow seemed to be pointing toward a corner.
I went to check.
Nothing.
I returned to the file.
Zoomed in.
Then I noticed a note written on the wall.
Almost invisible.
It said:
“Don’t look for where it was.”
Below it was another line.
“Look for when it started pointing.”
I closed the folder.
Five minutes later I opened it again.
Not because I wanted to.
Because I could no longer remember what had disturbed me.
Over the following days I lost several hours reviewing images.
I found searches I don’t remember making.
Files I don’t remember saving.
Notes I recognized perfectly.
The strange thing was something else.
I remembered writing them.
But I didn’t remember discovering the things they described.
This morning a new photograph appeared.
I don’t know where it came from.
The wall was the same.
The room was the same.
The shadow was the same.
The cane had disappeared.
In its place was a note pinned to the wall.
Just one sentence.
“You already corrected the posture.”
I think I need to move my neck.
Or maybe I’ve spent too much time trying to figure out when I started thinking that.
A few minutes ago I found the final annotation.
“It wasn’t a correction.”
The sentence ended there.
Below it was a date.
It belongs to a week after the photograph in which I found it.
I have to move my neck I am not moving it the arrival noise of the next sharp strike was already sedimented…
