I don’t know when it stopped being normal curiosity.
That’s the part I have the hardest time explaining.
Because if someone asked me when it started, I could probably point to an approximate date.
A video.
An article.
A forum thread.
Something that appeared one night while I was bored.
What I can’t point to is the moment it started staying with me.
At first it was just strange.
I read things and thought they had nothing to do with me.
It felt almost anthropological.
Like observing something from a distance.
Like reading about a hobby that belongs to someone else.
And yet I kept coming back.
That’s the part that embarrasses me.
Not the content.
The fact that I kept returning.
Because nobody goes back that many times to something they don’t care about.
For weeks I told myself it was only curiosity.
That I wanted to understand it.
That I found it psychologically interesting.
That it was a complex human dynamic.
Any explanation worked.
All of them except the obvious one.
I liked it.
Or at least some part of me was starting to feel drawn toward it.
And that part appeared before I was ready to admit it.
I still remember closing my laptop one night and realizing I was still thinking about what I had read.
Not the scenes.
Not the details.
The feeling.
The idea.
Something I didn’t even know how to name.
I went to bed annoyed with myself.
Because it felt absurd.
I had spent more than an hour reading about something that, in theory, had nothing to do with me.
And yet there I was.
Thinking about it.
Again.
The worst part was that the curiosity never settled down.
It worked in reverse.
The more I read, the more questions appeared.
The more questions appeared, the more I searched.
The more I searched, the more excitement I felt.
And the more excitement I felt, the more embarrassed I became about still searching.
It was a stupid loop.
A loop that seemed to feed itself.
I started doing ridiculous things.
Open a page.
Close it.
Come back five minutes later.
Read a little.
Leave.
Come back again.
As if I were negotiating with myself.
As if I could maintain a safe distance.
But every week that distance became a little smaller.
I notice it physically.
It’s strange to admit.
Sometimes I’m sitting there reading and suddenly realize I’ve been in exactly the same position for twenty minutes.
Completely still.
Completely absorbed.
As if my body knew something before I did.
As if some part of me were waiting to find something specific even though I still didn’t know what it was.
And then the embarrassment arrives.
Not dramatic embarrassment.
Small embarrassment.
Domestic embarrassment.
The embarrassment of closing a tab too quickly when you hear footsteps.
The embarrassment of deleting your browsing history even though nobody is going to check it.
The embarrassment of thinking: why am I reading this again?
Because I already know what’s there.
I’ve already read it.
And yet I come back.
Sometimes I think the excitement doesn’t even come from what I find anymore.
It comes from the search itself.
From getting closer.
From understanding a little more.
From crossing an invisible line and discovering another one behind it.
And another.
And another.
That’s the part I can’t explain.
Because if someone asked me what I actually want, I wouldn’t know how to answer.
Not yet.
I only know that it keeps taking up more space.
More time.
More attention.
More thought.
And the more space it occupies, the harder it becomes to pretend it’s still just curiosity.
I have to move my neck I am not moving it…
