There is something even more embarrassing than remembering him.
The fact that I do not have to.
Because he is already there.
Before I open my eyes in the morning, no image appears.
No command appears.
No fantasy appears.
A presence appears.
Something occupying space before thought begins functioning.
Sometimes I wake up a few seconds before the alarm.
And during those seconds something strange happens.
I am not thinking about the Master.
But I am not free from him either.
That is a more uncomfortable situation.
Because it means he has stopped being a thought and become a condition.
I stare at the ceiling.
I try to identify what I am feeling.
It does not feel like desire.
It does not feel like sadness.
It does not feel like nostalgia.
And the longer I spend trying to classify it, the more impossible it becomes.
Then I remember a specific morning.
A stranger waiting for a bus.
He was wearing an oversized blue jacket.
A crumpled plastic bag hung from one hand.
Nothing remarkable.
Nothing memorable.
And yet I remember exactly how he moved his left foot back and forth while waiting.
Because while I was watching him I thought:
“The Master would have noticed that.”
And from that moment the stranger stopped being a stranger.
He became a shared observation.
That is what is beginning to frighten me.
Not that the Master appears.
But that he appears between things.
Between details that have absolutely nothing to do with him.
Between objects.
Between gestures.
Between useless fragments of reality.
I am making coffee.
The water has not started boiling yet.
And suddenly I remember the circular mark.
The small mark left during the last session.
It has almost disappeared now.
Only a faint shadow remains.
A slight variation in the color of my skin.
And yet I keep checking whether it is still there.
For no reason.
Like someone verifying that a word remains written on a page even after reading it a hundred times.
I try concentrating on something else.
I fail.
Not because the mark is important.
But because it remains.
And permanence is precisely the problem.
The Marquis de Sade wrote about prisons.
I think he understood something worse.
That the most effective prisons do not always close doors.
Sometimes they simply reorganize attention.
And once attention learns a certain route, it continues traveling it on its own.
Hours later I am watching something ridiculous.
A documentary about restoring antique watches.
Nothing is related to the Master.
Nothing is related to submission.
Nothing is related to the laboratory.
And still something happens.
The camera focuses on a tiny metal component.
The restorer cleans it.
Places it back where it belongs.
And suddenly I feel that sensation again.
That impossible sensation.
As though something had been placed exactly where it was always supposed to be.
And then I think of him again.
Again.
Always again.
The more I try to understand it, the less sense it makes.
The less sense it makes, the more space it occupies.
The more space it occupies, the harder it becomes to ignore.
And the harder it becomes to ignore, the more ashamed I feel.
Because I keep telling myself it should disappear.
That time should correct it.
That weeks should wear it down.
But time does not help.
Time participates.
Time works for him.
There is no forgetting.
There is accumulation.
There is permanence.
There is the way a presence eventually installs itself among thoughts that were never designed to contain it.
And some nights, just before sleep, when the apartment is completely silent, I find myself staring at an empty mug on the table for several minutes.
I do not know why.
Nothing happens.
The mug remains a mug.
The room remains a room.
And yet I have the unbearable sensation that the Master is still there.
Not in front of me.
Not behind me.
But inside the way I look at things.
And that difference is far more difficult to remove.
I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
