The strange thing is that I no longer think as much about the silence of the room.
I think about the silence that appears when I try to replace it.
I try to work.
I try to read.
I try to talk.
I try to fill the hours with anything at all.
And for a while it works.
Or at least it seems to.
Until something shifts.
A small fracture.
A brief moment of distraction.
And then it returns.
Not exactly as a memory.
Not quite.
More as a comparison.
I am sitting in a café.
People are talking.
Cups are clattering.
Doors are opening.
Music is playing.
And suddenly I find myself measuring all of it against something else.
Against a silence.
Against a stillness.
Against a definition that does not exist there.
I do not like being submissive.
The sentence continues appearing.
No longer as a statement.
Almost as a question.
I do not like being submissive.
Then why do I keep returning to it?
Why do I keep comparing everything to it?
Why do I keep thinking about it when I wake up?
Why does this absurd sadness appear after too many days?
The more I think about it, the less sense it makes.
And the less sense it makes, the more space it occupies.
Sometimes I wonder whether the obsession is even about the Master anymore.
Because when I try to examine it closely, I find something different.
I do not find a person.
I find a sensation.
The sensation that everything was in focus.
The sensation that nothing was excessive.
The sensation that every object occupied exactly the place it was supposed to occupy.
The door.
The wall.
The breathing.
The hands.
The waiting.
Even that third red line.
The isolated one.
The one separated from the other two.
I still do not know why it remains.
But it does.
Like a fixed coordinate.
Like a motionless star in a sky that constantly changes.
Meanwhile the rest of the world seems to drift.
Weeks pass.
Conversations pass.
Plans pass.
Worries change.
Yet that line remains.
That room remains.
That clarity remains.
And perhaps that is why the sadness is so difficult to explain.
Because it does not feel like sadness.
It feels like nostalgia for definition.
As if I had experienced, for a few hours, a version of reality rendered at a higher resolution.
And now I have to return to living inside an image that is slightly out of focus.
That is what nobody would understand.
I do not miss the pain.
I do not miss the discomfort.
I do not miss the waiting.
I miss the clarity.
And that distinction is impossible to explain, even to myself.
Because it continues to contradict everything I believe about who I am.
I do not like being submissive.
I never did.
I never imagined something like this would have anything to do with me.
And yet there are mornings when I wake up and discover that the first image that appears is not a fantasy.
Not a scene.
Not an order.
It is simply the idea of remaining.
Remaining still.
Remaining present.
Remaining until the end.
And then that question returns, larger than before.
Who was I before this began occupying so much space?
I cannot find an answer.
I only find more rooms.
More depth.
More distance.
And the increasingly unsettling sensation that I am not trying to remember something.
I am trying to return to something.
I have to move the neck…
