Today I read a name that doesn’t quite fit with everything else.
The Marquis de Sade.
I don’t know why I paused there.
It is not an unfamiliar name to me.
That is the strange part.
But today it carried a different weight.
I kept reading as if nothing had changed.
But something had shifted.
Slightly.
Almost nothing.
And yet enough.
In the texts that mentioned him, there was nothing clear at first.
Only references.
Fragments.
Words like “structure,” “excess,” “limits.”
Ordinary words, if read quickly.
But read slowly… I don’t know.
They become unstable.
As if they are not describing something, but suggesting it from within.
I noticed something uncomfortable while reading.
Not in the content exactly.
In me.
A kind of more closed attention.
Stronger than usual.
I caught myself re-reading sentences without needing to.
Not for understanding.
But for a kind of expectation I cannot explain.
As if the text had a second intention that was not visible on the surface.
I closed the book for a few seconds.
Then opened it again.
I don’t know why I did that either.
Sade appeared in several contextual lines.
Explanations, analysis, commentary.
All very controlled.
Very academic.
But something was underneath.
Something not being said directly.
And that absence of explanation was, strangely, what kept me there the most.
It is not fascination.
Or not only that.
It is something else.
More uncomfortable.
As if simply continuing to read was already a way of entering a structure that doesn’t yet have a clear name in my mind.
I noticed I found it harder to turn the page.
Not physically.
Mentally.
As if moving to the next idea meant abandoning something I still don’t understand.
And that is absurd.
I know that.
But knowing it doesn’t remove it.
It only makes it more visible.
There was a brief moment when I thought:
“this shouldn’t be interesting to me.”
And right after thinking it, the interest did not decrease.
It changed shape.
That is what made me pause.
Not the content.
But the way my attention no longer responds in the same way.
As if something else were learning to observe before I do.
And I still don’t know what it is learning.
I don’t know when it stopped being just curiosity.
At first it was something almost neutral.
Reading. Watching. Following a thread.
Nothing more.
But now I find myself returning to the same pages without a clear reason.
As if I had forgotten to close something inside myself.
It is not urgency.
It is something else.
Slower.
Harder to justify.
I tell myself it is simple interest.
That sounds reasonable.
But it doesn’t fully fit.
There is a part of me that becomes slightly still when I read certain things.
I don’t know why.
And that is the first thing that unsettles me.
Today I closed the screen a few seconds earlier than usual.
I looked around the room.
Everything was normal.
Too normal, maybe.
The cup on the desk.
The faint noise from outside.
The light slipping through the edge of the curtain.
And still there was something off.
As if the room had remained the same… but I was no longer reading it in the same way.
It is not that something outside changed.
It is clumsier than that.
I am the one who no longer fully fits the way I used to perceive things.
I tried to explain it to myself mentally.
It doesn’t work.
When I think about it too much, it disappears.
When I stop thinking about it, it returns.
And that irritates me.
Because I cannot pin it down.
Today, while reading again, I noticed something small.
I went through the same paragraph twice.
Not because I didn’t understand it.
But because I had read it as if I were waiting for something that wasn’t written.
That gave me an uncomfortable feeling.
Almost embarrassing.
As if I had been searching for a second layer in something that was supposed to be flat.
I closed the page after that.
But not completely.
I left it open.
Just a little.
As if closing it fully would be… too final.
I don’t know why I thought that.
That is what unsettles me the most.
Not what I read.
But what I start expecting without meaning to.
There are moments when I catch myself imagining situations that don’t belong to my real life.
Not clearly.
More like variations.
Possible versions.
Small shifts.
And I don’t know what to do with that.
Because they don’t feel like foreign thoughts.
They feel… mine.
But not fully mine yet.
And the worst part is this:
it is not desire exactly.
It is anticipation.
As if something were beginning to organize itself at a level lower than what I can fully explain.
And I am only noticing it slightly too late.
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 pelvis stops the record reaching absolute zero I should
