At first it seemed accidental.
An article.
A video.
A comment buried among hundreds of other comments.
Nothing important.
Nothing that appeared capable of changing the direction of a life.
If someone had asked me what I was looking for back then, I would not have known how to answer.
Because I was not looking for anything.
Just reading.
Just watching.
Just feeling that strange curiosity that appears when you discover something that does not fit the image you have of yourself.
Maybe that is why I kept going.
Because it made no sense.
And because it made no sense, it became difficult to look away.
I read about dominance.
I read about submission.
I read about dynamics that seemed to belong to other kinds of people.
Stranger people.
More extreme people.
People further away from me.
And yet I kept reading.
One more page.
One more article.
One more video.
One more explanation.
Always with the feeling that the next one would finally make me lose interest.
But the interest never disappeared.
It only changed shape.
Curiosity began to resemble something else.
Something slightly warmer.
Something slightly more unsettling.
And that was when the first contradiction appeared.
Because the more curious I became…
the more excited I became.
And the more excited I became…
the more embarrassment appeared.
It was not a rational embarrassment.
Nobody knew.
Nobody was watching.
Nobody could judge me.
And yet it appeared anyway.
As if some distant part of myself were watching and asking:
Why do you keep reading this?
Why do you keep coming back?
Why are you so interested?
I had no answers.
Only evidence.
I kept returning.
I always returned.
The strange thing was that the excitement did not appear where I expected it.
It did not appear in fantasies.
Or images.
Or descriptions.
It appeared somewhere more abstract.
In the structure.
In the logic.
In the existence of an entire world that had remained invisible until that moment.
A world with its own rules.
Its own language.
Its own rituals.
And every time I discovered another layer, I felt the same surge of curiosity.
Like finding a hidden door behind another hidden door.
For weeks I convinced myself it was purely intellectual interest.
Research.
Learning.
Nothing more.
But there was one detail becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
I thought about it when I was not reading.
That was the first crack.
Small.
Almost invisible.
But impossible to forget.
Because it is one thing to research something.
And something entirely different to discover that something keeps thinking about you after you have closed the screen.
I remember one particularly absurd afternoon.
I was doing something completely ordinary.
A routine task.
And suddenly a question appeared.
A question that seemed to emerge from nowhere.
What does it actually feel like?
Not as fantasy.
Not as theory.
Not as text.
What does it really feel like?
The question remained for hours.
Then for days.
And when it disappeared it was replaced by another.
And then another.
And then another.
Without realizing it, curiosity had stopped being an activity.
It was beginning to become a place.
A mental place I kept returning to.
Not because I wanted to.
But because something inside me continued finding it interesting.
Continued finding it alive.
Continued finding it impossible to resolve.
There was no obsession yet.
No dependence yet.
No waiting yet.
Only a new sensation.
The suspicion that I had discovered a door.
And the growing inability to stop wondering what existed on the other side.
Blood pressure was one of the first things I began to notice when reading the Marquis de Sade.
It wasn’t about violence.
It wasn’t even about desire in the simplest sense of the word.
It was something harder to admit.
I would read a few pages and feel a strange pulse in my neck. I would close the book. Stand up. Try to think about something else. Yet the sensation remained, as if some part of me had been asked a question I did not know how to answer.
That was the embarrassing part.
I did not want to resemble the people who inhabited those texts. I did not want to recognize myself in them. And yet, every time I returned to the page, something inside me leaned a little further toward that intellectual darkness Sade described with such unbearable calm.
The room remained the same.
The same desk.
The same lamp.
The same dust suspended beneath the light.
But something had changed.
Not outside.
Inside.
My heart seemed to register those readings before my conscious mind did. As if it understood something I was still refusing to understand.
I remember staring at a small crack beside the window. It was not an important crack. Just a thin line in old paint. Yet I spent several minutes looking at it.
Because it resembled what was happening.
It was not a break.
It was an opening.
A tiny fissure.
Enough for an idea to begin entering.
Sade wrote about power. About obedience. About will. But the more I read, the less interested I became in the words themselves and the more disturbed I became by my own reaction to them.
Why did I keep reading?
Why did I want to know more?
Why did that curiosity produce such an uncomfortable mixture of excitement and shame?
I still had no answers.
I had not experienced anything.
There were no sessions.
No practices.
Only books.
Only texts.
Only nights that seemed too long.
And yet my pulse appeared to know a path that my mind still considered forbidden.
Sometimes I would place my fingers against my neck just to check.
Nothing extraordinary.
Just the heartbeat.
Steady.
Patient.
Waiting.
As if one part of me had arrived before the rest.
The dust still floated in the air.
The crack remained beside the window.
And I kept reading.
Not because I was convinced.
Perhaps precisely because I wasn’t.
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 artery stops the record reaching absolute zero I should
