The feather passes again.
Then again.
Then once more.
It does not hurt. It is not exactly pleasant either. What happens is stranger: entire regions of the body begin to lose priority while others acquire an absurd significance.
A single inch of skin becomes an event.
The rest of the organism waits.
Eventually the experience stops feeling like a sequence of sensations. It starts behaving like a place.
I am inside it the same way I am inside a room.
The touch continues.
And something curious happens: for a few seconds I become convinced the feather is following exactly the same path every time.
I know that is not true.
Or maybe it is.
I cannot quite verify it.
Then an involuntary laugh appears.
Then another.
Then a contraction that no longer feels like a reaction but like an automatic function of the system.
It is an awkward sentence, but it is the most accurate one I can find: it feels as though the body starts arriving before I do.
As if certain responses have decided to continue without waiting for my permission.
There comes a moment when I stop counting time.
Not because it disappears.
Because it changes shape.
The feather brushes across the same spot again—or what I think is the same spot—and suddenly the only thing that seems to be moving forward is the uneven rhythm of my breathing.
My attention no longer behaves rationally.
Part of me waits for the next touch.
Another part becomes trapped by the small sound a pipe makes as it cools inside the wall.
The sound appears.
Disappears.
Returns several minutes later.
It never matches anything.
Which is precisely why it becomes impossible to ignore.
The strangest sensation is not the laughter.
Not the spasms.
Not even the exhaustion.
It is discovering that I begin noticing details that seemed not to exist before.
A seam on a sleeve.
A crooked shadow beneath a chair.
A speck of dust suspended near a lamp.
For a moment it seems to move.
Maybe it doesn’t.
By the time I try to verify it, I am already paying attention to something else.
That is what changes.
It does not feel as though I am being forced to remain in a single place.
It feels as though everything else gradually loses weight.
The world keeps happening.
The pipe keeps clicking.
The glass remains on the table.
Someone closed a door somewhere else in the house several minutes ago.
But those things begin to orbit slowly around a single center.
Or maybe it isn’t.
I am no longer entirely sure.
I have to move the neck I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
