It wasn’t the image.
At least that’s what I told myself at first.
That it was something visual.
A photograph.
A video.
A particular pose.
Something simple.
Something I could point at and explain.
But it wasn’t.
Because I would close the screen and it stayed with me.
I came back the next day.
And the day after that.
And the day after that.
The coffee on my desk had gone cold.
I couldn’t remember when I stopped drinking it.
There was a thin layer of dust beneath the monitor.
I don’t know why I noticed it.
It had probably been there for days.
Maybe I was trying to look at anything except the thing I was actually interested in.
Anything except that.
I kept telling myself I was researching.
Which was true.
I read articles.
Forums.
Comments.
Personal accounts.
I wanted to understand.
That was the strange part.
The need to understand it so badly.
There are thousands of things I don’t understand.
I don’t spend hours reading about them.
I don’t keep returning.
I don’t open ten tabs before going to sleep.
I don’t catch myself thinking about them while waiting for an elevator.
This was different.
And that started to bother me.
Not the curiosity.
The intensity.
The way it seemed to grow on its own.
Like a tiny crack in a wall.
You notice it once.
Then you notice it again.
And after that you can’t stop seeing it.
It didn’t feel like arousal.
At least not the way I had always understood the word.
It felt harder to name.
More like gravity.
Like being pulled toward a question I couldn’t fully understand.
Sometimes I closed the browser with a strange sense of embarrassment.
As if someone could walk into the room and read my thoughts.
Even though nobody was there.
Just the blue light of the screen.
The distant sound of traffic.
And silence.
A lot of silence.
I remember one night in particular.
I had been reading for over an hour.
I stood up.
Walked to the kitchen.
Opened the refrigerator.
I wasn’t even hungry.
Then I came back.
And continued reading exactly where I had stopped.
As if something had been waiting for me.
That was the unsettling part.
Not the content.
Not the words.
The return.
How easy it was to come back.
As if one part of me had already made a decision that the rest of me hadn’t discovered yet.
Was it desire?
I don’t know.
Maybe not yet.
Was it curiosity?
Yes.
But it wasn’t only curiosity.
Curiosity usually fades when it finds answers.
This seemed to feed on them.
Every answer opened another door.
Every door became another question.
And every question occupied a little more space.
I look at the screen.
Then at the window.
Then back at the screen.
I don’t know exactly when this started.
Maybe that’s the wrong question.
Maybe the real question is why I keep returning.
And why every return comes with that impossible mixture of interest, relief, and embarrassment.
As if I were getting closer to something.
Or as if something had been getting closer to me for a very long time.
My neck I am not moving it…
