For my organism, the problem was never breathing.
The problem was discovering that I can no longer breathe without remembering.
For hours I tried to explain it to myself.
I built arguments.
I listed reasons.
I repeated the same sentence until it became worn out.
I do not like being submissive.
I do not like it.
I do not like occupying this place.
I do not like the way everything else loses definition.
And yet every line of reasoning returned to the same point.
The room.
The waiting.
The stillness.
The Master’s breathing.
I do not remember the exact intensity of the strikes.
That is the strange part.
I remember the intervals.
I remember the pauses.
I remember the waiting that existed between them.
As if my memory had decided to preserve the structure and erase the content.
I can reconstruct the rhythm.
I can reconstruct the silence.
I can reconstruct the breathing.
But I cannot reconstruct an explanation.
And that absence has become an obsession.
Because the less I understand what happened, the more space it occupies.
At first I thought I missed the excitement.
Then I thought I missed the authority.
Then I thought I missed the stillness.
Now I am no longer certain.
Because whenever I return there, I do not find any of those things.
I find a breathing pattern.
The Master’s breathing.
Slow.
Constant.
Unchanging.
As though the entire room had eventually synchronized itself to it.
I remained motionless.
Already adjusted.
Already corrected.
Already placed where I was supposed to be.
There was nothing left to do.
Nothing left to prove.
Nothing left to decide.
Only to wait.
And the more I remember that waiting, the harder it becomes to explain why it still matters.
Logic insists that it should not.
Logic lists arguments.
Logic builds conclusions.
But memory does not seem interested in logic.
Memory keeps returning to the same scene.
The same room.
The same red lines.
The same breathing.
The same unbearable sensation that something was ending and, because of that, seemed more important than anything else.
Perhaps that is why the obsession continues to grow.
Because I never reach the end.
I always return to the moment before it.
To the instant when I remained motionless.
Listening.
Waiting.
Feeling the next breath divide time into two perfectly equal halves.
And then the next one doing the same.
And the next.
And the next.
Until all reality seemed organized around something so small that it should have been impossible to remember.
And yet it remains here.
Sharper than the rest of my life.
I have to move the neck…
