I don’t know exactly when it started.
That’s what bothers me most.
I should be able to point to a specific moment.
One night.
One page.
One sentence.
Something.
But whenever I try to remember, I always find the same thing.
The tab was already open.
Nothing more.
A browser tab that had been sitting there for days.
Maybe weeks.
It wasn’t even remarkable.
I don’t remember opening it.
I only remember seeing it.
Always.
As if it had been waiting for me.
The ridiculous part is that I didn’t even click on it at first.
I would pass by it.
Read the title.
Move on with my day.
Or at least that’s what I told myself.
The first time I felt embarrassed was because of something absurd.
Not because of what I was reading.
Because of how often I came back.
I opened the page.
Read for a few minutes.
Closed it.
Returned an hour later.
Like someone checking whether a door is still open.
The door was always open.
That started to disturb me.
Not the page.
My need to check.
One night I caught myself doing something even stranger.
I had finished reading.
Turned off the screen.
Gone to bed.
And I was still thinking about a single sentence.
It wasn’t even an intense sentence.
Just an observation.
Yet it stayed with me.
Like an unpleasantly catchy song.
The next day it was still there.
And the day after that.
The troubling part wasn’t curiosity.
It was familiarity.
The feeling that I wasn’t discovering anything.
I was recognizing something.
I tried to convince myself it was intellectual interest.
Research.
Simple curiosity.
I liked repeating those words.
They sounded reasonable.
Adult.
Controlled.
But small cracks began to appear.
I read more slowly.
Returned to the same paragraphs.
Paused over details that didn’t seem important.
Especially the silences.
The pauses.
The moments when someone described expectation instead of action.
Those were the parts that stayed with me afterward.
The waiting.
The anticipation.
The strange calm that appeared just before imagining a surrender of control.
I’m embarrassed to write this.
Because it didn’t happen all at once.
I almost wish it had.
That would make it easier to explain.
Instead, it felt like discovering a mark on a table.
A small white mark.
You notice it once.
Ignore it.
Then you see it again.
Then you start looking for it.
And one day you can no longer remember whether it was always there or appeared later.
Curiosity worked like that.
It didn’t grow.
It returned.
That’s the right word.
It returned.
Every time I thought I had lost interest, it came back.
Every time I decided to stop reading about it, I found another tab open.
Another saved article.
Another note.
Another screenshot I didn’t remember keeping.
One night I found a folder on my computer.
I had created it.
The date proved it.
But I couldn’t remember doing it.
There was nothing unusual inside.
Just texts.
Bookmarks.
Links.
Still, I stared at the folder name for several minutes.
Because it was exactly the name I would have chosen.
And yet I had no memory of typing it.
I don’t know why something so small affected me so much.
Maybe because it was evidence.
Tiny.
Ridiculous.
But objective.
Something outside my head.
Something that remained even when I tried to rationalize it.
After that I began paying attention to something else.
Not what I was reading.
How I changed afterward.
How my thoughts adjusted.
How I kept returning to certain questions.
How I reread certain lines.
As if some part of me was learning something before I understood what it was.
That idea makes me uncomfortable in a way I struggle to explain.
Not fear.
Something worse.
Recognition.
Because the more I read, the less it feels like I’m approaching something unknown.
And the more it feels like I’m approaching something that was already waiting.
It happened again last night.
The screen lit the room.
The building was quiet.
I could hear the distant hum of the refrigerator.
Nothing extraordinary.
Nothing mysterious.
Just a normal room.
Just me.
Just an open tab.
I read a few lines.
Closed them.
Shut down the computer.
And still I remained sitting there for several minutes.
Looking into the dark.
Thinking something I would rather not admit.
Curiosity is no longer the strange part.
The strange part is the relief.
The relief that appears every time I return.
As if I am no longer searching.
As if I am remembering.
And I don’t know which possibility disturbs me more.
That something is there.
Or that part of me seems to recognize it before I do.
I have to move my neck…
