I shouldn’t be reading this again.
That was my first thought.
Not because I find it shocking.
That would be easier.
What’s uncomfortable is that I already know what’s on the page.
I read it yesterday.
And the day before.
And last week.
Yet here I am again.
I wasn’t looking for anything specific.
At least that’s what I tell myself.
I opened the book to a random page.
Then another.
Then another.
The way someone touches a bruise just to see if it still hurts.
What embarrasses me isn’t the content.
It’s the frequency.
I’m starting to recognize entire passages.
Whole sentences.
I know which paragraph comes next.
I know what image waits on the following page.
And still I keep reading as if I expect to discover something new.
A few days ago I thought I was researching.
That sounded reasonable.
An intellectual curiosity.
An exploration.
Something outside of me.
I’m not so sure anymore.
Because I’ve started noticing something strange.
It doesn’t happen while I’m reading.
It happens before.
I’m working.
Cooking.
Looking at something completely unrelated.
And suddenly a small thought appears.
Not a fantasy.
Not exactly.
More like an impulse.
The feeling that I could open the book for a moment.
Just a moment.
To check something.
I never know what that something is.
That’s the strange part.
I open the page looking for an answer to a question that doesn’t exist yet.
Yesterday I caught myself thinking about a scene I didn’t even like.
It wasn’t the most intense.
It wasn’t the most exciting.
It wasn’t even particularly interesting.
And yet it kept returning.
Circling.
Like a song I never chose.
I tried to figure out what made it special.
I found nothing.
And still it came back.
I think that’s what unsettled me.
Not the scene.
My insistence.
Because I started to suspect that I wasn’t returning to the text.
I was returning to the feeling of returning.
There’s a difference.
The first time you read to discover.
The tenth time you read to verify.
And I don’t know exactly when I crossed that line.
The worst part is that I’m beginning to recognize the mechanism while it’s happening.
I open a page.
Read a few lines.
Close it.
Tell myself that’s enough.
Five minutes later I’m back.
Not because I’ve forgotten something.
Precisely because I remember it.
As if part of me needs to confirm that it’s still there.
And the more I do it, the harder it becomes to explain what I’m looking for.
If someone asked me right now why I keep reading Sade, I wouldn’t know how to answer.
I could invent intelligent explanations.
Talk about history.
Literature.
Philosophy.
But none of them would be true.
The truth is much smaller.
And far more embarrassing.
The truth is that every time I close the book I feel a kind of absence.
Not desire.
Not exactly.
An absence.
As if something has been left unfinished.
So I go back.
Read another page.
And the absence disappears.
For a few minutes.
Only for a few minutes.
I’m beginning to wonder whether this was happening long before I noticed it.
Whether curiosity was simply the excuse something else found.
Something older.
Something that had already been waiting.
I don’t know when it started.
I can’t find the exact moment.
There’s a gap in the sequence.
A section my memory can’t illuminate.
I know when I bought the book.
I know when I opened it.
I know when I started reading.
What I don’t know is when I started returning.
And I suspect that difference matters more than it should.
I have to move my neck I should…
