I don’t think it was the darkness.
For a long time, I told myself it was simple curiosity. That I was reading for historical reasons. For psychology. For culture.
But the more I read, the harder that explanation became to maintain.
There was something in those pages that kept pulling me back.
Something I couldn’t quite understand.
And precisely because I couldn’t understand it, I kept searching.
I remember reading fragments of the Marquis de Sade late at night.
Not the passages people usually quote.
Not the scandalous ones.
The other ones.
The ones that reveal a strange way of looking at desire.
An uncomfortable way.
Almost clinical.
As if some people were not searching for pleasure at all, but for a kind of truth about themselves.
And that unsettled me more than it should have.
Because I recognized something.
I didn’t know exactly what.
But I recognized something.
The room was silent.
The only sound came from the computer fan.
Dust floated in front of the screen.
Tiny particles suspended in the blue light.
There were old nail holes in the wall where pictures used to hang.
I had never paid attention to them before.
That night I did.
I couldn’t stop looking at them.
As if I needed to look away from what I was reading.
As if the wall were easier to understand than myself.
Then something ridiculous happened.
I noticed that my pupils were dilated.
I don’t know how I noticed.
Maybe because of the reflection on the screen.
Maybe because I had spent too long observing myself.
But I noticed.
And I felt embarrassed.
Because nobody was there.
Nobody was watching me.
Nobody was judging me.
And yet I felt ashamed.
I think that was what disturbed me most.
Not the arousal.
Not the fantasy.
The contradiction.
I had always assumed that certain things belonged to other people.
Different people.
Distant worlds.
Not mine.
And yet I kept reading.
Kept searching.
Kept returning.
Sade wrote about excess.
But excess was not what fascinated me.
It was possibility.
Suspicion.
The idea that some part of me might be interested in something I had never imagined before.
Something that did not fit the image I had of myself.
I looked back at the screen.
Then at my hands.
Then at the wall.
Then at the screen again.
As if I were waiting for someone to appear and tell me that none of this meant anything.
But nobody appeared.
There was only me.
And that growing curiosity.
The room remained unchanged.
The dust still floated in the air.
The holes were still there in the wall.
The computer still illuminated the darkness.
But something had changed.
Only slightly.
Almost imperceptibly.
Enough.
Enough that, for the first time, I began to wonder why I kept reading.
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 iris stops the record reaching absolute zero I should
