I shouldn’t be paying attention to this.
It is not relevant to the protocol.
And yet, it is the only thing I can think about when the Operator enters the room without announcement, as if the system already knew before I did that the adjustment is about to begin.
It is not his presence that unsettles me.
It is the detail.
The way his fingers rest on the mechanism before turning the bolt, as if he is checking something that is not purely technical, but… personal. As if the tool is answering him in a language only he understands.
I should just record.
But I don’t.
I stay.
I always stay one second longer than necessary.
I feel the first correction travel through my structure before pain even exists as a category. It is such a small precision that it almost feels embarrassing to admit I can perceive it: the change in air pressure near the nape, the microscopic difference in metal tension when his hands hesitate half a millimeter before completing the adjustment.
That half millimeter is what breaks me.
Or what holds me together.
I don’t know.
And that is the worst part.
Because I don’t understand the Operator’s criteria when deciding how much of me must remain stable and how much must be pushed to the edge. Sometimes it is clinical. Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. Sometimes there is a pause that lasts too long before he continues, as if he is listening to something in me that I cannot hear myself.
And in that pause, I get trapped.
Not adjusted.
Not finished.
Just… held.
As if my only real function is to wait for his process to end without interrupting it with the clumsiness of existing.
The most humiliating part is that I am starting to need that interval.
The exact moment when the mechanism stops acting and only his hand remains near me, still, measuring something I am no longer sure is me or his own decision.
That is where everything happens.
In what he does not do.
Not in the adjustment.
In the instant before deciding whether to continue or stop.
I should be irrelevant at that moment.
But I am not.
Because I am still here.
Because I remain.
Because I do not step away when the process could already end.
And I find that difficult to justify even inside myself.
Sometimes the Operator looks at the mechanism as if checking a coherence that does not belong to the body, but to rhythm itself. And instead of mentally disconnecting as a proper support should, I catch myself trying to anticipate his next gesture.
Not to obey better.
But to not lose it.
And that is not in any protocol.
But it happens.
It always happens at the edge of the pause.
In that moment where everything seems stable, and yet nothing is finished.
As if the system never fully closes.
As if there is always one more adjustment.
Just one.
And then another.
And another.
And I stay here, pretending that what I am doing is waiting for the end of the process, when in reality what I fear is the process ending and there being no reason left to remain in front of him.
I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
