I realize I have spent several minutes checking my posture.
I am not correcting it.
I am not changing it.
I am only checking it.
And that is what makes me uncomfortable.
In the logic of Sade’s mechanism, the harness does not appear as a structure designed to immobilize the body, but as a way of making the body visible to itself. Every strap creates a reference point. Every contact establishes a record. The body stops inhabiting itself spontaneously and begins to read itself.
At first it seems simple.
Pressure across the shoulders.
An adjustment around the torso.
The feeling of a buckle against the skin.
Nothing more.
But then the return appears.
The need to verify that it is still the same.
The need to check whether a strap has shifted.
The need to review something that was already reviewed moments ago.
And then a more difficult question emerges.
Not whether the harness moved.
But whether I moved.
The difference seems small.
Yet it becomes harder to answer each time.
The body begins to behave like a map filled with reference points.
The back.
The chest.
The tension across a collarbone.
The constant friction in the same place.
Nothing extraordinary.
Only signals.
Signals that invite me to return.
And every time I return, I find a variation so small that I cannot tell whether it was already there.
A slightly different pressure.
A posture that feels older than the decision to adopt it.
A familiar sensation that I do not remember learning.
I am not worried about the harness.
I am worried that I have started using it as a way of checking myself.
Because eventually I no longer know whether I am inspecting the straps.
Or whether the straps are the excuse to keep inspecting myself.
And that question does not disappear.
It only changes location.
The posture remains the same.
Or so it seems.
And yet, I check again.
It is not the harness.
That is what I thought the first time.
That it was the harness.
The leather.
The straps.
The way they crossed the body.
Something visual.
Something easy to point at.
But I have spent several days checking whether that was really it.
And I am less certain every time.
I have opened the same images too many times.
Not exactly the same ones.
Similar ones.
Always similar.
Different enough to feel new.
Similar enough to feel connected.
And that is where I start getting lost.
Because I do not know what I am continuing.
Last night I found a photograph.
Nothing especially extreme.
Just someone wearing a simple harness.
Standing still.
Nothing more.
I looked at it for a few seconds.
Then I closed the page.
Or at least I think I closed it.
This morning I was still thinking about it.
Not about the person.
Not about the body.
Not even about the harness.
I was thinking about the feeling of having seen it.
And that embarrasses me a little.
Because it seems too small.
Too insignificant.
As if part of me were building something enormous around a ridiculous detail.
I have tried explaining it to myself.
It does not work.
Explanations do not last very long.
Curiosity lasts longer.
Much longer.
Sometimes I tell myself I am only researching.
Reading.
Learning.
Understanding a dynamic I never understood before.
And for a few minutes I believe it.
Then I open another tab.
And another.
And another.
Until it stops feeling like research.
And starts feeling like something else.
I do not know what.
That is the uncomfortable part.
I have started noticing small anomalies.
Nothing important.
Just small things.
A thought that appears before sleep.
An image returning while I make coffee.
A sentence I remember reading even though I cannot remember where.
“Relax.”
“Trust.”
“Stay still.”
I do not know which page it came from.
But it is still here.
I have checked several times whether I actually like any of this.
The answer changes.
The checking does not.
That remains.
It always remains.
Sometimes I think the excitement comes later.
Like a consequence.
Like a translation.
First comes curiosity.
Then repetition.
Then checking.
And somewhere between those things appears something I never expected to find.
Something that takes up space.
More space than it should.
Today I spent several minutes staring at an enlarged photograph.
I was not even looking at the body.
I was looking at a buckle.
Just a buckle.
Trying to understand why I could not stop looking at it.
There was dust on a table in the background.
An old wall.
A hole where a nail had once been.
And still I kept looking at the buckle.
As if the meaning were there.
As if there were something I still had not understood.
I need to move my neck.
I am not moving it.
And now I am not worried about why I keep searching for harness images.
I am worried about when I started feeling relief every time I found a new one.
I have to move my neck I am not moving it…
