I never liked the idea of being submissive.
Not even now.
There are days when that word still feels foreign, as though it belonged to someone else. As though it described a biography that has nothing to do with mine.
And yet I keep returning.
That is what I do not understand.
I do not return to a fantasy of obedience.
I do not return to an identity.
I return to a process.
Sometimes it happens at absurd moments.
While standing in line.
While working.
While trying to focus on something entirely different.
My mind leaves the room I am standing in and returns to the laboratory.
Not to the beginning.
Never to the beginning.
It returns to the end.
To the instant when the Master has finished.
To the moment when nothing more is being adjusted.
To the moment when his hands disappear.
To the moment when everything has already been decided.
I do not know why.
Perhaps because there is an answer hidden there that I still have not understood.
The Marquis de Sade wrote about systems in which people ceased being individuals and became functions within a larger structure.
For years I believed that was exactly what distanced me from his writings.
Now I suspect it is what keeps drawing me back.
Not because I want to disappear.
Not because I want to become something else.
But because I want to understand what happens when someone willingly reaches the edge of a decision and discovers that he keeps moving forward.
That is the part that haunts me.
Not the pain.
Not the stillness.
Not the obedience.
The continuation.
The fact that the process keeps advancing even while part of me continues insisting that I should not be there.
There is something unsettling about that.
Something that defies ordinary logic.
Because arousal should obey preferences.
It should follow convictions.
It should respect conclusions.
And yet it does not.
It arrives on its own.
It arrives before the arguments.
It arrives even when I try to dismiss it.
As though an unknown region of my mind had made a decision without consulting me.
That is why I return to the end.
Because the end seems to contain an explanation.
I imagine the Master finishing the work.
Making a final inspection.
Confirming that nothing remains unfinished.
And then stepping away.
Nothing spectacular happens.
No revelation.
No miracle.
Only the structure remains.
And somehow that image possesses more force than any reasoning I attempt to construct against it.
Perhaps because I am not obsessed with being submissive.
Perhaps I am obsessed with understanding why I continue imagining that moment.
Why I keep mentally revisiting the same scene.
Why I keep expecting that the next time I return to it I will discover something I have not seen before.
And while I search for that answer, the process continues.
Not inside the laboratory.
Inside me.
Like a question that refuses to end.
Like a sentence that never reaches its final period.
Like a door that closed long ago and that, somehow, I continue hearing close again.
The neck has locked I should…
