I never thought much about my jaw.
It was one of those parts of the body that simply existed.
Like elbows.
Like fingernails.
Like the background hum of an empty room.
But after several weeks of reading about dominance and submission, I began noticing strange things.
Small things.
Ridiculous things.
Things I would rather not have noticed.
Sometimes I would realize that I was clenching my teeth while reading.
It didn’t happen all the time.
Only at certain moments.
Certain sentences.
Certain stories.
I would read one line.
Then another.
And suddenly I would notice the tension in my jaw.
As if I were waiting for something.
As if my body had understood something before I did.
That embarrassed me more than it should have.
Because I wasn’t participating in anything.
I wasn’t even talking to anyone.
I was only reading.
Only observing.
Only trying to understand why these ideas kept occupying space inside my head.
I remember one night in particular.
I had been reading texts about the Marquis de Sade.
I wasn’t trying to become aroused.
Or at least that was what I told myself.
I was trying to understand.
That was the word I kept repeating.
Understand.
Analyze.
Research.
Then the sensation appeared.
That small tension.
My jaw tightening.
The muscles hardening by a few millimeters.
Nothing dramatic.
Nothing visible.
Just a tiny reaction.
And precisely because it was so small, it became impossible to ignore.
The room was silent.
Dust floated near the lamp.
In one corner of the wall there were old holes where shelves had once hung.
The plaster around them was slightly cracked.
I don’t know why I noticed.
Maybe I needed to look at something else.
Because the real discomfort wasn’t on the screen.
It was inside me.
In realizing that I kept reading.
In realizing that I wanted to keep reading.
In realizing that certain questions produced something very close to anticipation.
Sade wrote about excess.
But excess was not what unsettled me.
It was the possibility that some desires remain hidden for years.
Desires that do not arrive as an impact.
But as a question.
As a footnote.
As a page that refuses to be closed.
I clenched my jaw again.
Without noticing.
And when I finally became aware of it, I felt a strange embarrassment.
Small.
Quiet.
Difficult to explain.
The room remained unchanged.
The dust still floated in the air.
The cracks were still there in the plaster.
The screen still illuminated the darkness.
But something had changed.
Something small.
Something I still could not name.
Something that kept reading along with me.
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 maxilla stops the record reaching absolute zero I should
