For me, the problem is that I never wanted this.
It would be much easier if I had.
I could explain it.
I could file it alongside other desires.
I could say: this attracts me, this belongs to me, this is what I want.
But it is not like that.
Submission never interested me very much. Even now I am not sure that it does.
What obsesses me is something else.
It is him.
Not him as an Owner.
Not even him as a person.
What obsesses me is the way he seems to understand something that I do not.
The way he adjusts a strap.
The pause before answering a question.
The precision with which he corrects a detail I had not even noticed.
These are small things.
Absurdly small things.
Yet I keep returning to them.
Again and again.
Sometimes I am working and I remember the position of his hands.
Not doing anything important.
Just resting on a table.
And I lose the thread of whatever I was thinking.
It irritates me.
It embarrasses me a little.
Because it does not feel like desire.
It feels like an incomplete equation.
Like a word I should remember but cannot.
Like entering a room to retrieve something and immediately forgetting what it was.
The less I understand it, the more present it becomes.
And the more present it becomes, the less I understand it.
I have tried to solve it rationally.
It does not work.
I have tried to ignore it.
That works even less.
There are entire days when I do not think about him.
Or so I believe.
Then I discover that I have been rearranging objects on my desk exactly the way he rearranged tools on a table.
And the feeling returns.
Not pleasure.
Not love.
Not admiration.
Something worse.
Recognition.
As though one part of me has found a pattern that the rest is still unable to decode.
Yesterday, for example, I was buying bread.
Nothing more.
A completely ordinary task.
And suddenly I thought about something he said months ago.
It was not even an important sentence.
I do not even remember the context.
I only remember the cadence.
The way he said it.
I spent the rest of the day trying to remember why.
I never figured it out.
The loaf hardened on the kitchen counter while I kept thinking about someone who was not even there.
That is beginning to feel like an illness.
Maybe it is.
The unsettling part is that I do not feel any closer to an answer.
I feel exactly the opposite.
Every time I think I understand something, the center shifts.
As though the obsession is not trying to resolve itself.
As though it wants to survive.
As though it needs to remain a question.
And sometimes I wonder what would happen if I truly understood.
If one morning I woke up and everything finally made sense.
If I could point to the exact source of this fixation.
I have to move the neck I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
