What embarrasses me most is not the obsession.
It is the fact that I am still arguing with it.
Still.
After all this time.
I still sit across from myself as though it were possible to win a conversation that I have quite obviously already lost.
I try to reason.
I try to analyze.
I try to explain.
I try to reduce everything to a logical chain of causes and effects.
And for a few minutes it seems to work.
For a few minutes I think I am recovering ground.
Then it returns.
Not as an image.
Not as a desire.
Not as a fantasy.
It returns as a direction.
As an orientation.
As the sensation that all of my attention is still pointing toward the same place even while I am looking somewhere else.
That is what becomes unbearable.
Because I do not like it.
Or at least I keep telling myself that I do not.
I repeat that I do not want this.
I repeat that I do not want to think about it.
I repeat that I do not want to become someone who revolves around the same idea for months.
And while I am repeating it, the idea continues growing.
Not because I am feeding it.
But because it seems to feed on resistance itself.
The more I try to understand it, the less I understand it.
The less I understand it, the more space it occupies.
The more space it occupies, the harder it becomes to think about anything else.
And the harder it becomes to think about anything else, the more embarrassed I feel.
Because I keep watching it happen.
And I remain incapable of stopping it.
There is something particularly humiliating about discovering that time is not fixing anything.
Time is supposed to wear things down.
It is supposed to blur them.
It is supposed to erode them.
But here the opposite happens.
Time does not erase.
Time compacts.
Time organizes.
Time turns a fixation into a structure.
Sometimes I try to remember when it began.
I cannot.
Or perhaps I can and simply do not want to admit it.
Because admitting it would mean acknowledging how much space it has occupied.
How many conversations.
How many hours.
How many apparently ordinary thoughts that slowly curved back toward the same center.
And then comes the part I dislike admitting most.
The part that never fits inside any reasonable explanation.
The sensation of remaining.
The sensation of waiting.
Not for a specific event.
Not for an action.
Not for a resolution.
Just waiting.
As though some part of me were still quietly adjusting itself toward something that never quite arrives.
As though waiting itself had become a permanent activity.
That should reduce the excitement.
It should exhaust it.
It should make it absurd.
And yet the opposite happens.
The excitement no longer exists despite the contradiction.
It exists inside the contradiction.
It grows alongside it.
It feeds on it.
The more impossible it becomes to understand, the more intense it becomes.
And perhaps that is the most embarrassing part.
Not the obsession.
Not the fixation.
Not the permanence.
But discovering that some part of me keeps returning.
Even after it has decided to leave.
Even after it has decided to forget.
Even after it has decided that it does not want to remain here any longer.
Because there are decisions that end.
And there are things that simply remain.
And permanence never seems to be in any hurry.
I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
