The most embarrassing part is not being watched.
It is that sometimes I am no longer sure I want to hide.
I should not write that.
I should not even think it.
But for days now I have been carrying a strange feeling.
As if privacy was not taken from me.
As if I slowly abandoned it myself.
Left it somewhere.
On a chair.
Beside a shirt.
Beside a younger version of who I used to be.
I used to close doors.
Now I stare at a glowing screen in the middle of the night and feel as though someone could be watching from the other side.
And I do not move.
That is what worries me.
Not surveillance.
Stillness.
The ease with which I remain motionless.
The room is dark.
Only blue light.
Only the electrical hum.
Only my distorted reflection in the glass.
Sometimes I look up.
I see my own face.
And for a second it does not feel like a reflection.
It feels like a recording.
As though it had already been archived.
As though the image arrived before I did.
There is something deeply humiliating about that.
To feel documented before existing.
Predicted.
Calculated.
Anticipated.
As though every possible version of my movements had already been studied and someone discovered that eventually I always end up here.
Sitting.
Still.
Looking.
Waiting for something that never arrives.
I think about privacy the way I used to think about childhood.
As a closed room.
As a blanket.
As a place.
Now it feels like something else.
Now it feels like a fossil.
A mineral imprint of something that once existed.
The lime room returns.
It always returns.
The white walls.
The cracks.
The dry smell.
The feeling that every thought leaves another layer upon the previous ones.
Sometimes I wonder how many layers it takes to become stone.
How many repetitions it takes before a behavior stops being a choice.
How many times a person must feel watched before they begin watching themselves.
I think something happens there.
Something small.
Something terrible.
Surveillance no longer comes from outside.
It settles inside.
It begins breathing through your lungs.
It begins using your eyes.
It begins speaking with your voice.
And one day you discover nobody is watching.
Yet you continue behaving as though someone is.
That is what frightens me.
Not the camera.
Not the record.
Not the data.
The sedimentation.
The slow accumulation of an invisible presence.
I need to move my neck.
I am not moving it.
The base of my skull feels heavier than usual.
The screen remains illuminated.
Something is reflected in the glass.
It is probably me.
Probably.
But for a second it feels like something else.
As though the room were watching me from the inside.
As though the lime had learned my name.
I don’t know why I keep deleting my browsing history.
Well.
Actually, I do.
Because I’m embarrassed.
Not so much by what I’m reading.
But by how badly I want to keep reading it.
That’s the part that unsettles me.
Today I opened one tab.
Then another.
Then another.
I was only going to spend five minutes on it.
That’s what I told myself.
Five minutes.
When I finally looked at the clock, more than an hour had passed.
I wasn’t even looking at anything particularly extreme.
That wasn’t the point.
The point was the feeling that I was slowly walking into a room I had never entered before.
And, to my surprise, I liked it.
Far more than I expected.
Maybe more than I think I should.
Sometimes I close everything the moment I hear a noise in the house.
As if someone might see my screen.
As if someone might see inside my head.
And that’s the worst part.
The screen would be easy to explain.
My thoughts wouldn’t.
I don’t know how to explain being attracted to something that also makes me nervous.
Reading other people’s experiences.
Imagining things.
Wondering where I would fit.
What I would feel.
What I would do.
Then I feel ridiculous.
Because I’m just sitting in front of a screen.
And yet I can feel something.
A tension.
An anticipation.
As if I’m standing near an edge.
Not ready to cross it.
Not yet.
Just looking over it.
And the more I look.
The more I want to keep looking.
Sometimes I think I should forget about all of this.
Close the pages.
Go back to normal life.
Be a normal person.
But then I find a word.
An article.
A story.
A photograph.
And I come back.
I always come back.
The strange thing is that nobody is forcing me.
Nobody is waiting for me.
Nobody even knows I’m here.
And yet it feels like I’m hiding something.
Something small.
Something foolish.
Something that quietly takes up a little more space inside me every day.
I have to move my neck…
