The worst part is not thinking about it.
The worst part is realizing how often I return.
There is no command.
No obligation.
Nobody is watching me.
And yet I keep returning.
I return with a regularity that I am beginning to find humiliating.
Sometimes it happens while I am doing something entirely unrelated.
Reading a sentence.
Looking through a window.
Listening to a conversation.
And suddenly it appears.
Not as an image.
Not even as a memory.
More like a silent reorganization of attention.
Everything remains the same.
Yet something shifts.
And I already know where.
For a long time I pretended it was curiosity.
Then I pretended it was fascination.
Then I pretended it was habit.
Now I no longer know what to call it.
The obsession has remained too long to keep using small names.
The shame is not the intensity.
The shame is the frequency.
The ease.
The speed with which certain thoughts find their way back.
As if there were an invisible slope inside my mind.
As if every thought eventually slid toward the same place.
I try arguing with myself.
It does not work.
I try explaining it.
That does not work either.
Explanations quickly become new material for the obsession.
Everything feeds it.
Even resistance.
Especially resistance.
There are moments when I find myself waiting for something.
And whenever I try to identify what I am waiting for, the same uncomfortable answer appears.
Nothing specific.
No event.
No promise.
Only continuation.
Only the possibility of remaining inside the same orbit a little longer.
That is what is hardest to admit.
It is not that I want to solve the obsession.
It is that part of me fears losing it.
Because it has occupied space for so long that I no longer know exactly what would remain if it disappeared.
Sometimes I think of Sade.
Not his excesses.
Not his systems.
But his ability to remain inside an idea until the idea itself began to resemble a room.
A room without locks.
A room where nobody forces anyone to stay.
And yet one remains there.
Obsession does not demand.
It remains.
And that permanence begins to resemble something dangerously close to home.
The neck locks in an angle of absolute calligraphy I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
