The back began to fascinate me in a way I still struggle to explain.
It was not a specific fantasy.
Not even an image.
It was something stranger.
The more I read the Marquis de Sade, the more attention I paid to things that had once seemed insignificant.
A posture.
The curve of a back as someone leaned forward to read.
The way a person occupied space without realizing it.
I had never thought about such things before.
And yet there I was.
Watching.
Observing.
Returning again and again to details that had once passed through my life unnoticed.
That was what made me uncomfortable.
Because it did not feel like I was discovering something new.
It felt as if I were remembering something that had always been there.
Something quiet.
Waiting.
The nights grew longer.
I would read a few pages.
Pause.
Look around the room.
The lamp still glowing.
Dust suspended beneath the light.
Old stains on the wooden floor.
A small chip beside the doorframe.
Everything seemed motionless.
Except me.
Something inside me was moving slowly.
And the worst part was that I did not know where it was going.
Sade wrote about authority.
About obedience.
About desire.
But it was not his theories that stayed with me.
It was the feeling that certain words had found the exact place where they belonged.
Like a seed falling into a crack.
Like water working its way into an old wall.
It did not happen suddenly.
It happened slowly.
Page after page.
Thought after thought.
Sometimes I caught myself studying my own reflection.
The position of my shoulders.
The tension in my back.
The way I sat.
As if I were trying to discover something written there.
Something other people could already see.
Something I still could not.
And then came the embarrassment.
Not dramatic embarrassment.
Something worse.
A quiet embarrassment.
A silent one.
The feeling of approaching a truth that did not fit the person I believed myself to be.
The room remained unchanged.
The lamp still burned.
The dust still drifted through the air.
And I kept reading.
More slowly each night.
More carefully.
Like someone afraid of finding an answer.
I have to move my neck I am not moving it I should the base of the skull a porous alabaster surface the taste of lime filling the glottis the pulsing inertia of the back stops the record reaching absolute zero I should
