I can’t remember what I was looking for in the first place.
That’s the first thing that bothers me.
If someone asked how this started, I could probably give a reasonable answer.
Curiosity.
Interest.
A random search.
Something I stumbled across while reading something else.
But the truth is that I’m not sure.
I’ve spent several days trying to locate the exact moment it began.
Every time I think I’ve found it, it seems further away.
As if it started earlier.
Much earlier.
Tonight I caught myself doing something strange.
I opened a tab.
Then another.
Then another.
Not because I needed information.
I had already read the information.
It was something else.
I wanted to see it again.
I don’t know why.
The strange thing is that I wasn’t even aroused.
Not in the usual sense.
It felt more like pressure.
A silent pull.
The kind you feel when you’ve forgotten something important.
The screen lit the room.
Nothing unusual.
An unmade bed.
A half-empty bottle of water.
A charger tangled beside the wall.
Everything normal.
And yet something felt wrong.
It took me several minutes to realize what it was.
The chair.
The chair was exactly where it always was.
But I remembered leaving it somewhere else.
I stared at it for too long.
There is a rule I don’t fully understand yet:
anything I look at long enough begins to feel as if it was waiting for me.
I closed the page.
Then opened it again.
Not because I had forgotten something.
Because I wanted to make sure it was still there.
And it was.
The same words.
The same images.
The same uncomfortable feeling.
As if someone had written a description of a part of me I hadn’t met yet.
That should have pushed me away.
It didn’t.
That’s the embarrassing part.
The more absurd it seemed, the harder it became to close the window.
For a few seconds I imagined explaining it to someone.
The thought made my face feel warm.
Not because of what I was reading.
Because of the interest itself.
Because of the attention.
Because of how much space it was beginning to occupy inside my head.
There is a difference I never noticed before.
I thought curiosity was a way of approaching something.
Now I suspect it can also be a way of remaining.
And I think that’s what worries me.
Not the content.
Not the fantasies.
Not the theories.
The permanence.
I’m starting to notice small things.
Sentences returning hours later.
Images resurfacing while I’m doing something else.
Questions that seem to be waiting for me.
What happens if I keep reading?
What happens if I understand why this interests me?
What happens if this isn’t an accident?
The question changes slightly every day.
The feeling doesn’t.
A few minutes ago I tried to convince myself that all of this was temporary.
I meant it.
Then something ridiculous happened.
I noticed a small white mark on the edge of my desk.
I would swear it wasn’t there yesterday.
I leaned closer.
And suddenly I remembered seeing it before.
Not yesterday.
Much earlier.
The mark didn’t appear.
The memory did.
For some reason that felt worse.
Because I’m beginning to suspect that I’m not discovering something.
I’m beginning to suspect that I’m recognizing something.
The difference is small.
But it keeps growing.
Right now I could close the laptop.
I could go to sleep.
I could forget about all of this.
The door remains open.
That’s exactly what worries me.
I used to think curiosity was taking me somewhere.
Now I’m not so sure.
I’m starting to believe that something was already here when I arrived.
And that I’ve spent days calling it curiosity because I still don’t have a better word.
I turn off the screen.
The room goes dark.
I wait for the feeling to disappear.
It doesn’t.
I look at the chair.
It’s exactly where it was.
I think.
I have to move my neck I am not moving it…
