Over time I discovered something that unsettles me more than it should.
The safeword did not become an exit.
It became a proof.
A proof that an outside still existed.
For a long time I believed its function was to limit pressure. Now I suspect its real function was something far stranger: to demonstrate that there was still a place from which pressure could be measured.
That was what I failed to understand.
The code never organized the density.
It organized the space around the density.
Like a pencil mark in the margin of a page.
Like a forgotten key inside a drawer.
Like the crumpled receipt from an insignificant purchase found years later inside a book.
Insignificant objects.
Objects that nevertheless prove another day once existed.
Another arrangement of time.
Another version of the world.
Now I struggle to remember it.
Not the code.
The landscape that made the code necessary.
And that difference follows me everywhere.
There are nights when I try to reconstruct the previous architecture.
Not the laboratory.
Not the mechanism.
What was outside.
The region that supposedly justified the existence of an exit.
I try to imagine it precisely.
An ordinary street.
A bus stop.
The sound of someone closing a blind.
A glass forgotten beside a bed.
But the details appear in isolation.
They fail to form a system.
They remain suspended like fragments recovered from a building that can no longer be rebuilt.
And then an unpleasant suspicion appears.
Perhaps the problem is not that I forgot the map.
Perhaps the map was never complete.
The contradiction is obvious.
I keep telling myself that I retain an external reference.
That I could return to it.
That it still exists.
Yet the more I attempt to describe it, the more artificial it becomes.
More theatrical.
More like scenery assembled after the fact.
Like childhood memories that eventually resemble photographs viewed too many times.
I no longer know whether I remember the place.
Or whether I remember remembering it.
That is what truly becomes compacted.
Not the will.
Not the body.
The capacity to verify.
The possibility of comparing one coordinate against another.
The ability to point at something and say:
“This was here before.”
Because every time I try, I discover that the references have shifted by a few millimetres.
Like furniture moved during the night.
Like a picture frame hanging slightly crooked.
Like the kitchen clock that has been three minutes fast for months and nobody bothers to correct it.
Nothing seems wrong.
Yet something has stopped matching.
Sometimes I think the true function of the code was to prevent that drift.
Not to stop the mechanism.
Not to reduce the load.
Simply to preserve a distance.
A small distance between experience and interpretation.
Between the map and the territory.
Between the stone and the idea of stone.
And now I am no longer certain where one ends and the other begins.
The silence remains.
The word remains intact.
I can still say it.
That has not changed.
The disturbing thing is something else.
The disturbing thing is that every day it becomes harder to remember what its existence was supposed to prove.
As if the exit were still there, perfectly functional, while the world it once led to had slowly faded away.
I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
