Living inside this laboratory for so long has produced an effect I never expected.
I have not become stronger.
I have not become more obedient.
I have not even become more still.
I have become unable to remember certain distances.
I used to think compaction meant eliminating empty spaces.
Now I suspect it means something else.
It means forgetting what those spaces were for.
There is an important difference.
An empty room is still a room.
But a room whose purpose can no longer be remembered begins to feel anomalous.
Sometimes it happens with very small memories.
Ridiculous ones.
The other day I found an old grocery list folded inside a drawer.
Milk.
Coffee.
Batteries.
Bread.
Nothing unusual.
Yet I stared at it for several minutes.
I could not understand why it disturbed me.
Then I realized it was not the list.
It was the person who wrote it.
I could not reconstruct them.
I knew it was me.
I recognized the handwriting.
I recognized the slant of the words.
But the logic connecting that individual to this system seemed to have vanished.
As though someone dismantled a bridge overnight.
Compaction did not eliminate my will.
It eliminated the corridors connecting one version of me to another.
And that is worse.
Much worse.
Because I can still see both shores.
I simply cannot find the crossing.
For a long time I interpreted this as stability.
Now I suspect it resembles a peculiar form of erosion.
The laboratory does not occupy my thoughts constantly.
That would be too simple.
What is unsettling is that it appears during absurd moments.
While waiting for water to boil.
While searching for a missing sock.
While listening to an elevator take a few seconds longer than usual.
There is something inside those tiny pauses.
Something unbearable.
As though reality were waiting for an additional coordinate to arrive.
And that coordinate never arrives.
Sometimes I try to remember how experience was organized before.
Not the content.
The structure.
The architecture.
The way one thing led toward another.
But memory behaves like a building viewed through dense fog.
I can distinguish the outline.
I cannot enter it.
Then a thought appears that I find difficult to admit.
Perhaps I do not miss a presence.
Perhaps I miss an orientation.
Perhaps the missing piece was never someone.
Perhaps it was the system that allowed me to measure the distance between someone and myself.
That is the obsession.
Not the loss.
The impossibility of calculating it.
Because ordinary loss has edges.
This does not.
This feels more like discovering that a beam is missing inside a house and not knowing which one.
The house remains standing.
The walls remain where they were.
The kitchen is still the kitchen.
The window still faces the same courtyard.
Yet something in the distribution of weight has shifted.
And ever since, every room feels slightly incorrect.
The contradiction is obvious.
I still believe I chose all of this.
I probably did.
That is not the issue.
The issue is that each year it becomes harder to locate the individual who made that decision.
Not because they disappeared.
Because the map leading back to them is fading faster than the memory of their face.
The density increases.
The explanation increases.
The coherence increases.
Yet something essential remains absent.
Something small.
Something almost ridiculous.
Like a key whose lock no longer exists.
Or an address written on a piece of paper after the city itself has vanished.
The record continues.
But I no longer know whether I inhabit a structure or the perfectly preserved ruins of one.
There is a cracked cup at the back of a cabinet that I never throw away not because I need it but because every time I try an absurd sensation appears that it is holding something I cannot remember.
I cannot move my neck…
