It was not the weight that made me return.
That is what I keep telling myself.
It was the idea.
The image.
The strange feeling of finding myself thinking about something as simple as a motionless load.
A sandbag.
Nothing more.
And yet I kept returning.
In the imagination of the Marquis de Sade, weight rarely appears as a spectacular event. What is unsettling is not the force pressing upon the body, but the silent permanence of something that remains. Sandbags become a metaphor for that persistence. They do not transform the body through a single moment of intensity, but through the slow accumulation of a presence that never completely disappears.
Perhaps that is why I find it difficult to stop thinking about them.
Because they do not create rupture.
They create constant verification.
They are still there.
And the body knows it.
A few days ago I stood up from my chair after hours of reading.
I expected to feel lighter.
It did not happen.
For a second I had the impression that something was still resting on my shoulders.
Nothing was there.
I checked.
Even so, it took me several moments to convince myself.
The sensation did not disturb me.
What disturbed me was the fact that I had expected it.
In Sadean literature, weight eventually becomes a form of record. The load itself matters less than the habit of adjusting to it. The back adjusts. The shoulders adjust. The posture adjusts.
And eventually one no longer knows whether the body is adapting to the weight itself or to the memory of the weight.
I think that is where the real anomaly lies.
Not in the sandbag.
Not in the load.
But in the moment when the body continues responding to something that is no longer there.
I keep telling myself that I am interested in the symbol.
What is strange is that I keep finding myself checking something else.
Not how much it weighs.
But when I started expecting its absence.
I stood up.
For a moment I expected to feel resistance.
Not physical resistance.
Something stranger.
The expectation of resistance.
Like stepping down onto a stair that is no longer there.
Or trying to remember a word before realizing you have forgotten it.
I looked at the floor.
There was nothing there.
And yet I remained still for a few more seconds.
Waiting.
As if some part of me were still calculating an absent weight.
The lime room remained unchanged.
The same cracks.
The same dust gathered along the edges.
The same motionless light suspended across the walls.
And yet I had the feeling that something had changed.
Not the room.
Not the memory.
The distance between them.
I returned to old notes.
I was not searching for information.
I was not searching for answers.
I was searching for discrepancies.
Small deviations.
Evidence that something had shifted while I was away.
I found a saved photograph.
I do not remember downloading it.
The strange thing was not finding it.
The strange thing was recognizing it immediately.
I knew exactly where it had been taken.
I knew exactly why I had saved it.
I even knew which thought it had provoked.
But I could not remember the moment I had done it.
It felt like finding my own footprint in a place I could not remember visiting.
I stared at it for several minutes.
Waiting for an explanation to appear.
None did.
Only a question.
Then another.
Then a third.
The first one was simple.
Why did I keep returning?
The second was less comfortable.
When had I started returning?
The third remains unanswered.
How many times had I returned before realizing I was returning?
The sandbag stopped being important a long time ago.
Then the weight stopped being important.
Then the immobility.
Then even the idea of restriction itself.
The only thing that remained was the return.
The repetition.
The strange sensation of discovering earlier traces of an attention that seemed to have continued working during my absence.
At first it was curiosity.
Then it became research.
Then a question.
Then I no longer knew what to call it.
Normally questions disappear once they are answered.
This one does not.
Every answer seems to add another layer.
Another stratum.
Another crack inside the crack.
As if explanation closes nothing.
As if it only expands the territory still left to explore.
The lime room has become something like an external memory.
An archive preserving versions of me that I do not remember being.
Notes.
Marks.
Highlighted sentences.
Saved photographs.
Small pieces of evidence pointing toward a continuity that always seems to have begun before I arrived.
I found another note.
I do not remember writing it either.
It contained only one sentence:
“It is not the weight that remains.”
Nothing else.
No explanation.
No context.
I read it several times.
I still do not know whether it was describing something…
or warning me about something.
I have to move my neck.
I am not moving it.
I wait to notice the exact instant when it begins.
But whenever I think I have found it, it has already happened.
Sometimes I suspect the same thing is happening with everything else.
With memories.
With questions.
With photographs.
With returns.
I keep saying that I am only trying to understand it.
The strange thing is that I no longer know whether I say that to explain it…
or simply to keep going.
I have to move my neck I am not moving it…
