Something has started happening lately and I do not know how to name it.
That is part of the problem.
If I could name it, perhaps I could place it alongside other familiar things.
Sadness.
Nostalgia.
Melancholy.
Anxiety.
But it is none of those.
Or perhaps it contains fragments of all of them.
I do not know.
It appears during absurdly small moments.
While waiting for water to boil.
While looking for something in the refrigerator.
While letting some random video continue playing in the background.
Suddenly I feel something.
And for a few seconds I cannot identify what it actually is.
It does not hurt.
But it is not pleasant either.
It is not sadness.
Sadness always seemed to have a cause.
This does not.
This appears before any explanation exists.
As if the explanation arrives later merely to justify something that was already there.
The more I examine it, the stranger it becomes.
And the stranger it becomes, the more space it occupies.
A few days ago it happened while I was folding clothes.
Nothing important.
Nothing memorable.
I was simply folding a shirt.
And suddenly that feeling appeared.
A kind of silent emptiness.
Not an emptiness that wants to be filled.
Worse.
An emptiness that seems to be waiting for something.
Or someone.
And before I could stop the thought, he appeared.
Not dramatically.
Not as a fantasy.
Not as an image.
Simply as a silent reference point.
A coordinate.
Something around which my attention reorganized everything else.
That is what embarrasses me.
Not the obsession itself.
The naturalness of the obsession.
The ease with which it happens.
The complete absence of effort.
I try to remember how my mind worked before.
And each time it becomes harder.
Because the more time passes, the harder it is to distinguish which thoughts are truly mine and which orbit around him.
Sometimes I think about Sade.
Not his excesses.
Not his provocations.
But his understanding that certain fixations do not operate through intensity.
They operate through repetition.
Permanence.
Accumulation.
They do not arrive like storms.
They arrive like moisture.
And one day you discover that the entire building is soaked.
That is exactly what this feels like.
I do not feel the obsession growing.
I feel it infiltrating.
It enters empty spaces.
Pauses.
Seconds that used to contain nothing.
Before waking.
While making coffee.
While checking my phone.
While waiting for a message.
While watching something completely irrelevant.
And then the feeling returns.
That sadness which is not sadness.
That weight which is not weight.
That absence which is not absence.
And the more I try to understand it, the harder it becomes to escape it.
Because thought produces questions.
Questions produce attention.
Attention produces permanence.
And permanence produces something that feels less and less like an emotion and more and more like a permanent condition of the internal landscape.
Sometimes I tell myself it should disappear.
That it should exhaust itself.
That time should wear it away.
But the opposite happens.
Time seems to give it more rooms.
More places to remain.
More corners in which to wait.
And the most humiliating part is that I still pretend to be surprised every time it appears.
As if I did not already know it was there.
Waiting.
Long before I started thinking about it.
I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
