There is something I try to explain to myself every morning and never quite manage to understand.
It happens before I open my eyes.
Before I even remember what day it is.
For a few seconds there is a kind of silence.
And then it appears.
Not an image.
Not an order.
Not a voice.
Just a presence.
The same presence.
Always the same.
As if it had remained awake while I was sleeping.
Sometimes I tell myself that today will be different.
That today I will think about other things.
That today the obsession will have weakened.
But even that thought eventually leads to the same place.
It is embarrassing to admit.
Because the harder I try to push it away, the more obvious it becomes.
The Master appears during absurd moments.
While I wait for water to boil.
While I search for something on a shelf.
While watching a video that has absolutely nothing to do with any of this.
There is a moment.
A pause.
A gesture.
And somehow everything becomes connected.
I do not understand how it happens.
That may be the most uncomfortable part.
The more I analyze it, the less logical it seems.
And the less logical it seems, the more space it occupies.
Sometimes I remember something that happened weeks ago.
Not the session.
Not the important details.
Exactly the opposite.
I remember a glance.
The position of a hand.
The way he remained silent for a few seconds.
I remember a circular mark that took days to disappear.
And I am embarrassed by how many times I return to that memory.
Not because it hurt.
Not because it was important.
But because it remained.
Because it stayed there.
Because for days it appeared while I was getting dressed.
While showering.
While turning toward the mirror.
And every time I saw it, I remembered something I did not want to remember.
Or perhaps something I did want to remember.
I am no longer sure.
That uncertainty is part of the problem.
I try to reason.
I try to leave it behind.
I try to explain why it still occupies so much space.
But the process works in reverse.
The more I think about it, the less I understand it.
The less I understand it, the more room it takes.
The more room it takes, the stronger the feeling becomes.
And the stronger the feeling becomes, the more ashamed I feel.
It should not work that way.
But it does.
Sometimes I think about Sade.
Not his excesses.
Not even his theories.
I think about the possibility that he understood something deeply uncomfortable about certain obsessions.
That some fixations do not survive because they are fed.
They survive because we keep trying to expel them.
Time does not solve it.
Time makes it worse.
There is no forgetting.
There is only permanence.
And permanence has a strange way of reorganizing reality.
It begins appearing everywhere.
In small empty spaces.
In the seconds before sleep.
In the seconds after waking.
In food.
In videos.
In conversations.
In silence.
And the most humiliating part is that I keep telling myself it should be over.
That it should have faded.
That it should occupy less space.
Yet it remains.
Waiting.
As if it never left the room.
I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
