I shouldn’t be reading about this again.
That’s the first thing I thought.
It’s also the first thing I thought yesterday.
And the day before.
And last week.
It’s not the content.
I wish it were that simple.
What unsettles me is coming back.
Coming back to exactly the same place.
Opening the same article.
Reading the same lines.
Reaching the same paragraphs.
As if I were checking something.
As if I expected to find a difference.
Today I caught myself searching for a specific word.
Whip.
Just that word.
Nothing else.
I don’t even remember when it started attracting my attention.
I think I used to find it ridiculous.
Not anymore.
Now I stare at it for too long.
As if it were hiding something.
As if it knew something about me.
It’s absurd.
I know.
I closed the page.
I put my phone face down.
I went into the kitchen.
I drank some water.
I came back.
I didn’t even decide to come back.
I simply found myself in front of the screen again.
That’s the part that embarrasses me.
Not what I’m reading.
How easily I return.
Today I found something strange.
A screenshot.
Saved months ago.
I don’t remember taking it.
I don’t even remember reading that text.
But there it was.
The same word highlighted.
Whip.
I stared at it for several seconds.
Too many.
As if I had recognized it before reading it.
As if I had already been waiting for it.
I’m starting to think curiosity doesn’t work the way I imagined.
It doesn’t grow.
It doesn’t move forward.
It returns.
It always returns.
And every time it takes up a little more space.
Sometimes I tell myself I’m only researching.
That it’s interest.
That it’s a phase.
But then I find a tab that’s been open for days.
Or a search I don’t remember typing.
Or a sentence I can finish before reaching the end.
And the explanation stops feeling sufficient.
The worst part is that nothing has happened yet.
Not a session.
Not an experience.
Not a real conversation.
Nothing.
And yet I feel that something is already moving.
Very slowly.
Like dust suspended inside a closed room.
So slowly it’s difficult to see.
So slowly it may have started a long time ago.
Long before I noticed it.
I need to close the page.
I’m not closing it.
My hand was already on the mouse before I decided to move it.
And for a very brief moment I wonder something I try not to wonder.
Not why I keep coming back.
But when was the first time I already knew I would.
What unsettles me most is not the whip itself.
It’s the fact that I keep thinking about it.
Not as a scene.
Not even as a fantasy.
More like a question that keeps returning.
In the writings of the Marquis de Sade, the whip rarely appears as a simple blow. It functions as a confirmation. A way of turning something invisible into something impossible to ignore. The body records one mark. Memory records another.
Maybe that’s why I keep reading about it.
Not because I want to understand pain.
But because I want to understand why certain images return so easily.
I close a page.
I come back a few hours later.
I read the same paragraph.
I recognize a sentence before I reach the end.
And I begin to suspect that the repetition matters more than the content.
In Sade’s literature, the whip often acts like a boundary. A moment when an idea stops being abstract and becomes something that occupies space inside the mind. I don’t know if that’s what draws me toward it. I don’t know when I started looking for it either.
The only thing I know is that every time I return, I find something I could swear I have read before.
And yet I cannot remember the first time.
I have to move my neck…
