There is something I do not like admitting.
Because it sounds ridiculous.
And because, if someone had told me this a few months ago, I probably would have rolled my eyes.
But I am beginning to suspect that I am no longer reading these things the way I did at the beginning.
At first there was distance.
Curiosity.
The calm feeling of observing something from the outside.
Now I am not so sure.
Sometimes I catch myself running my fingers along the edge of a page while reading.
It means nothing.
I know.
It is an automatic gesture.
Unimportant.
And yet I notice that I always do it at the same moments.
When a sentence unsettles me.
When an idea appears that should feel foreign.
When Sade’s name returns between paragraphs written by people who seem much smarter than I am.
Then my hand becomes still.
And I keep reading.
One more line.
Just one.
Then another.
Nothing dramatic happens.
Nobody changes.
Nobody falls.
Nobody crosses a boundary.
It is worse than that.
A small feeling appears.
The suspicion that part of me is paying more attention than it should.
Yesterday I found dust on the cover of a book.
A thin layer.
Almost invisible.
I wiped it away with my sleeve.
And for a moment I wondered how long I had been returning to the same volume.
I could not answer.
That embarrassed me slightly.
Not because the book was scandalous.
But because I realized it had begun occupying a strange space inside my routine.
Like a tiny crack in a wall that goes unnoticed for weeks.
Until one day you see it from a different angle.
And then you cannot ignore it anymore.
What unsettles me about Sade is not Sade.
It is the attention that arrives afterward.
The way certain ideas remain.
The way certain questions linger while I make coffee.
While I wait for an elevator.
While I look at the dirt gathering in the corner of a window I never quite clean.
These are not constant thoughts.
They are worse.
Because they disappear.
And then they return.
And each time they return they feel slightly more familiar.
As if they are learning the way back.
Sometimes I close the book.
I look around the room.
The lamp.
The chair.
The tiny holes left by nails removed years ago.
Everything remains exactly where it was.
Everything seems normal.
And yet there is a feeling that is difficult to name.
As if something had begun touching me without touching me.
And I still do not know which part of me is answering.
The first stage is simple curiosity.
Or at least that is what he tells himself.
Articles.
Forums.
Stories.
Fragments of conversations between people who seem to inhabit a world completely unrelated to his own.
He watches from the outside.
Then comes the first fracture.
Not a fantasy.
Not an experience.
Not a desire.
A moment when something he reads stops feeling like information and starts feeling like recognition.
A sentence.
An emotion.
A dynamic.
Something he understands too quickly.
Faster than he should.
That is when curiosity begins feeding excitement.
Excitement begins feeding embarrassment.
And embarrassment begins feeding curiosity again.
The loop closes.
Questions multiply.
Answers stop satisfying.
He keeps reading.
Not because he needs information.
Because he is searching for that strange feeling again.
The sensation that something inside the text already belongs to him.
And one night a thought appears.
Brief.
Silent.
Almost invisible.
Not:
“What is this?”
But:
“Why does this matter so much to me?”
The question vanishes immediately.
The discomfort remains.
And from that point forward, every page is no longer being read from the outside.
Something inside him has begun reading as well.
I have to move my neck I am not moving it I should the base of the skull a porous alabaster surface the taste of lime filling the glottis the pulsing inertia of the touch stops the record reaching absolute zero I should
