I shouldn’t have saved that page.
It wasn’t even particularly extreme.
Just an explanation.
A text about rules.
About trust.
About control.
I closed it.
I remember closing it.
What I don’t remember is why I came back twenty minutes later.
I wasn’t even aroused.
That would be easier to explain.
It was something else.
A kind of mental itch.
Like trying to remember a word and realizing you’re no longer thinking about the word itself, but about the need to find it.
I read it again.
Slowly.
One sentence was highlighted.
I don’t know if I highlighted it.
It wasn’t an important sentence.
In fact, if someone asked me now what it said, I probably couldn’t repeat it.
I only remember the feeling of seeing it.
And then seeing it again.
And then needing to see it one more time.
I’m embarrassed to write this.
Because I always thought curiosity worked differently.
I thought you found something interesting and chose to explore it.
This felt reversed.
As if the depth had arrived first.
As if some part of me had already been there waiting.
Over the next few days I started collecting things.
Articles.
Interviews.
Book excerpts.
Notes.
Screenshots.
Nothing important.
And yet I couldn’t delete any of it.
One night I opened a folder on my computer.
I only wanted to organize some files.
I found a screenshot I didn’t remember saving.
There was nothing remarkable about it.
A definition.
Three lines of text.
I stared at it for several seconds.
Then I closed the folder.
Five minutes later I opened it again.
Not because I had found something strange.
That’s the part I’m still trying to explain.
I opened it because I needed to make sure it was still the same.
That was when I started worrying.
Not about the content.
About myself.
Because I wasn’t researching something anymore.
I was monitoring it.
And I didn’t understand why.
Sometimes I catch myself doing ridiculous things.
Reading the same paragraph again.
Searching the same term.
Returning to a page I already know by heart.
As if I expect to find a difference measured in millimeters.
As if some part of me is convinced that things move when I’m not looking.
The worst part is that I don’t feel fear.
If I felt fear, this would be simple.
What I feel is recognition.
An impossible familiarity.
The uncomfortable sensation of arriving late to a conversation that began without me.
There are moments when I close everything.
The browser.
The notes.
The screenshots.
I tell myself that’s enough.
That it was only a passing curiosity.
That tomorrow I’ll think about something else.
And for a few minutes I believe it.
Then a small question appears.
Ridiculous.
Almost invisible.
It doesn’t ask what I’m looking for.
It asks when I started looking.
And I never find an answer.
The only thing I find is that I’m already opening another tab.
I have to move my neck I am not moving it…
