The contact settles in.
Temperature stops feeling like a property of objects and begins behaving like architecture. Cold occupies volume. Heat occupies distance. Attention no longer moves freely between them.
There is no clear border between sensation and the anticipation of sensation. The organism tries to classify them separately. It fails. The result is neither pain nor relief. It is a strange form of internal stillness. As though certain decisions are no longer necessary.
For a moment I am convinced that the room has become colder.
Then I realize it hasn’t.
The room is exactly the same.
I try to swallow.
The gesture feels unnecessarily complicated.
As if someone had inserted additional steps without warning me.
There is a constant contradiction.
The more aware I become of my body, the less it seems to belong to me.
Breathing continues.
The muscles continue responding.
Yet something in the usual hierarchy has shifted a few inches to the side.
I cannot say exactly what.
A shadow moves across the wall.
Probably a car passing somewhere beyond the window.
By the time I try to verify it, it is already gone.
Stillness does not arrive all at once.
It accumulates.
Like dust gathering on a surface nobody cleans.
Like mineral deposits forming around a pipe.
Like frost sketching silent geometries across a pane of glass.
I begin to understand that I am not waiting for warmth.
Nor for cold.
I am waiting for something else.
A kind of mineral stability in which the effort of defending myself no longer seems necessary.
The temperature continues changing.
So do I.
But not at the same speed.
And that difference eventually occupies more space than the thermal contrast itself.
The pipe creaks again.
Exactly as before.
For a moment I think the sound is lower.
It is not.
Or perhaps it is.
I am no longer entirely certain.
And for some reason that uncertainty feels more real than any certainty ever could.
The air tastes of marble resin and a renunciation that no longer has fissures it is the report of a body that has returned to the earth to be only structure engraved by his hand I have to move the neck I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
