The most humiliating thing is not the marks.
The most humiliating thing is how often I find myself looking for them.
Days have passed.
I know because I have slept several times.
Made coffee.
Answered messages.
Watched videos that had absolutely nothing to do with any of this.
And yet I always end up looking at the exact same places.
As if I am expecting to find something.
As if the disappearance of those traces were important news.
The circular mark the Master left near my side no longer carries the same color.
That should mean it is fading.
But that is not what it feels like.
What it feels like is distance.
And discovering that part of me does not want it to disappear is far more embarrassing than having received it in the first place.
I try to reason through it.
I tell myself it is absurd.
That they are only temporary remnants.
That the body is doing what bodies always do.
Repair.
Erase.
Continue.
But the more I think about it, the less convincing the explanation becomes.
Because I do not miss the mark.
I miss the moment it appeared.
And that is much worse.
Sometimes it happens before I am fully awake.
I am still half asleep.
I do not yet know exactly who I am going to be that day.
And for a few seconds I remember the Master’s hand before I remember my own name.
That should worry me.
It does not.
The fact that it does not worries me even more.
The problem was never intensity.
The problem is permanence.
The Marquis de Sade appears in my thoughts sometimes in a strange way.
Not as a person.
Not as an author.
But as a question somebody left open centuries ago and which still wanders through certain rooms of the human mind.
I try to close that question.
I try to archive it.
I try to tell myself it does not matter.
But some questions survive precisely because they never receive an answer.
And this seems to be one of them.
While I cut vegetables.
While I wait for water to boil.
While I stare absentmindedly at a screen.
While I listen to conversations completely unrelated to any of this.
The Master remains.
Not as a presence.
Not as a command.
But as a quiet reorganization of attention.
A private mental force that keeps pulling thought toward the same place again and again.
Time should solve it.
That is what people always say.
But time does not seem to solve it.
Time seems to refine it.
Make it more precise.
More intimate.
Harder to explain.
The marks fade.
The colors change.
The skin continues.
And yet something remains watching the exact place where they once existed.
As if part of me were still waiting for instructions that never arrive.
As if absence itself had become a habit.
And the harder I try to look away…
the more aware I become that I am still looking.
The neck locks in an angle of absolute inscription I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
