Envy does not begin as an emotion.
It begins as reading.
At first, I do not recognize it in myself. I recognize it in the image.
In the shine of a life that does not belong to me but, for some reason, I cannot stop processing.
For a while I thought I was observing others.
Then I understood something more uncomfortable.
I was not observing.
I was comparing without having decided to.
And comparison is not an act.
It is an infrastructure that activates itself.
Sade appears here in a strange way.
Not as an author.
As logic.
In his world, inequality is not a social accident.
It is a necessary condition of the system.
Someone looks. Someone is looked at. Someone is excluded.
There is no balance.
Only positions.
And what is disturbing is not the violence.
It is the naturalness with which it holds.
I close the screen for a moment.
But the image does not close.
It remains elsewhere, as if it no longer depended on the device.
The room is silent.
And yet something keeps running.
Not outside.
Inside.
Small fragments of other lives appear like remnants of a continuous combustion.
A short story.
A face without context.
A success that needs no explanation to hurt.
And this is the strange part:
it is not what I see that hurts.
It is that something in me registers it as measurement.
As if value were an external scale that never stabilizes.
Sade would not call this envy.
He would integrate it into the mechanism.
Into the economy of desire where nothing exists without a hierarchy of intensity.
I close my eyes.
Nothing changes.
Because the problem is not the image.
It is the fact that it remains active even when I am no longer looking.
Later I find the screen on again.
I do not remember leaving it that way.
Or maybe I do.
That no longer matters.
What matters is that the content has changed, but the sensation has not.
Same structure.
Another life.
Another fragment impossible to inhabit.
And me, in the same position.
As if comparison did not depend on what I see, but on the ability to keep looking without interrupting the mechanism.
Sade did not speak of networks.
But he understood something more basic.
That desire does not need freedom.
Only difference.
And difference, sustained long enough, becomes system.
In the end I realize something unexpected.
I am not trying to stop looking.
I am trying to find the exact point where looking started to feel necessary.
And that is what does not fit.
Not envy.
But continuity.
The sense that there is no interruption possible between seeing and measuring.
As if the world had stopped being a world.
And became a comparison that never ends.
I have to move my neck I am not moving it I should the base of the skull a surface of cold plaster the smell of old walls filling the glottis I should…
