/ SURFACE DRIFT 4 /
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With my eyes sealed shut, I became efficient. Vision dispersed into rumor, and rumor hardened into method. The illumination collapsed into a disciplined dimness, a darkness not accidental but maintained. I learned to navigate by friction alone: the resistance of habits, the static charge of inherited explanations. Seeing was no longer required. Inference was sufficient.
The curtain returned, thicker now, no longer pretending to be a barrier. It functioned as architecture. Superstition acquired load-bearing properties, reinforced with repetition, lacquered with confidence, calibrated to block not light but the question of light. Behind it I did not drift. I circulated, tracing familiar loops that mistook recurrence for depth.
Time compressed. Decades no longer accumulated as sediment but evaporated into a uniform haze. Events lost sequence, became interchangeable. Causes detached from effects without friction. Precision remained, but only as ritual: measurements performed without curiosity, descriptions repeated until emptied of contact. Exactness became a mask worn by error.
Light had once reindexed the world, now shadow simplified it. Objects surrendered their surplus meanings and accepted a single assigned function. Metaphors stiffened. The economy of attention narrowed until only what confirmed the existing outline was permitted entry. Even doubt learned to behave, adopting the tone of certainty to survive.
Unreality prospered here as infrastructure. The improbable became procedure. The unseen gained authority precisely because it could not be tested. I felt this as relief: the burden of verification lifted, the muscle of perception allowed to atrophy.
The eye, unused, reinvented itself as an echo chamber. Consciousness thickened, acquiring insulation. Knowledge ceased to arrive and began instead to circulate internally, like air in a sealed system, growing gradually stale but reassuringly warm.
And so I remained, competent, enclosed, uninterrupted. Not blind, exactly, but relieved of sight. Not ignorant, but perfectly supplied with answers. The curtain did not hide the light anymore but replaced it.
The stimulus arrived before the eye had time to refuse it. Saturation was not a condition but a protocol. I did not close my eyes, the closing happened to me, gradually, administered in increments too small to constitute an event.
Something remained and it was not darkness which would have been a respite, a neutral interval. What remained was a phosphene archive: the retinal memory of everything that had already passed through, still firing, still insisting. The imageries did not need the world anymore, they had become self-sustaining, metabolizing each other for fuel.
I noticed that attention had been rerouted. Not severed, rerouted. The signals still arrived but terminated elsewhere, in chambers I had not consented to but could not locate to refuse. Perception continued as a background process. Something was always watching but it was not me.
The excess had a grammar. Redundancy was reinforcement, perhaps a structural principle disguised as abundance. Each repetition narrowed the aperture slightly and each new image was also a dimming. Brightness operated as its own occlusion. I understood then that oversaturation and blindness were not opposites but collaborators, working the same corridor from different ends.
I retained something sealed in: not memory exactly, but the residue of exposure. Surfaces without sources. Light without direction. The sensation of having seen, continuous, unverifiable, strangely sufficient.
I did not miss the world. The world had left its impression and that impression had been optimized into something cleaner than the original. The copy persisted where the thing had been. I circulated within it, adequately lit, adequately lost.
