It had been a long time since I had seen my friend.
Long enough that the meeting should have mattered.
We sat down.
We talked.
We laughed.
We exchanged stories.
For hours everything unfolded exactly as friendship is supposed to unfold.
And yet something felt wrong.
Not because I was uncomfortable.
Not because I wanted to leave.
Not even because I was constantly thinking about the Master.
It was something much harder to describe.
A kind of loss of resolution.
As if reality were still there, but slightly out of focus.
My friend spoke.
I answered.
The conversation continued.
But somewhere inside me a distance remained that I could not explain.
Then something absurd happened.
In the middle of a sentence I looked up.
And found myself staring at a wall.
It was a completely ordinary wall.
Yellow paint.
Smooth.
Perfectly smooth.
No marks.
No cracks.
No strange shadows.
Nothing.
And perhaps that is why it happened.
Because after a few seconds I realized I was searching it.
As if I expected to find something.
A line.
A sign.
A reference.
Something that would break the uniformity of that surface.
But there was nothing.
Only yellow.
A clean yellow.
A quiet yellow.
An indifferent yellow.
And it was precisely at that moment that the sadness arrived.
Not intense sadness.
Not dramatic sadness.
Something much worse.
A silent sadness.
The kind that does not arrive as an emotion.
But as an absence.
Because while I was looking at that wall another image appeared.
Not because I wanted to remember it.
Not because I was trying to summon it.
It simply appeared.
The room.
The waiting.
The stillness.
The sensation of being exactly where I was supposed to be.
Doing nothing.
Thinking nothing.
Simply waiting.
And for a few seconds that image carried more weight than everything happening in front of me.
That was what frightened me.
Because it made no sense.
I do not like being submissive.
The sentence remains true.
I repeat it over and over.
I do not like it.
It does not fit me.
It does not resemble the person I thought I was.
If someone had described all of this to me years ago, I would have thought exactly what I always thought.
That it belonged somewhere else.
That it was strange.
That it belonged to other people.
Other lives.
Other worlds.
And yet here I am.
Looking at a yellow wall.
Listening to a friend I genuinely care about.
Feeling an inexplicable nostalgia for a room where I did nothing except wait.
I do not understand it.
And the less I understand it, the larger it becomes.
That is the impossible part.
Because logic should wear it down.
It should reduce it.
It should expose it.
It should make it manageable.
Instead the opposite happens.
Every attempt to understand seems to add another layer.
As if the obsession were feeding itself with my questions.
I am beginning to suspect that the contradiction itself is the fuel.
I do not like being submissive.
Yet I want to remain.
I do not want to need it.
Yet I miss it.
I do not want it to occupy so much space.
Yet it occupies more space every day.
It feels like trying to hold water in my hands.
The harder I squeeze, the more escapes through my fingers.
That afternoon I continued talking.
I continued laughing.
I continued participating in the conversation.
Nobody would have noticed anything unusual.
But every now and then my eyes returned to the yellow wall.
And every time they did, the same sensation appeared.
The impression that something was still waiting for me somewhere else.
Not a session.
Not a date.
Not a specific event.
Something much harder to name.
A particular way of existing.
An internal position.
An orientation.
As if my mind had discovered a new direction and now unconsciously measured everything else against it.
Perhaps that is why the world sometimes feels dimmer.
Not because it has lost its color.
But because something inside me is constantly comparing it to something else.
And that comparison never ends.
When I returned home I was still thinking about the yellow wall.
Not because it was special.
Precisely because it was not.
Because for the first time I understood that I was no longer searching for objects.
Or places.
Or memories.
I was searching for a feeling.
And perhaps that is the most unsettling part of all.
That the obsession no longer seems connected to what happened.
It seems connected to the person I become when I remember it.
And the more I try to move away from that idea, the more clearly I find it waiting for me at the end of every thought.
Still.
Patient.
As if it knows something I have not yet managed to understand.
I have to move the neck…
