I do not know exactly when it began.
I suppose it was after several nights of reading.
One page.
Then another.
An essay.
A forum.
An interview.
A fragment of the Marquis de Sade quoted somewhere that I was probably not even understanding completely.
Nothing seemed particularly important on its own.
But something was accumulating.
Something small.
Something I preferred not to examine too closely.
Because the more I read, the more curious I became.
And the more curious I became, the harder it was to pretend that all of this was merely an intellectual curiosity.
That is what embarrasses me.
Not the arousal.
The curiosity.
The feeling of wanting to keep looking.
Wanting to understand.
Wanting to move a little closer.
I remember one especially absurd night.
I was sitting in front of the screen.
Nothing was happening.
Nobody was speaking to me.
Nobody was giving me orders.
There were no ropes.
No rituals.
No sessions.
Only words.
Words about control.
About surrender.
About people who seemed to find relief precisely in the things I had always assumed should inspire fear.
And yet I kept reading.
Kept scrolling.
Kept searching.
That was when I noticed the sweat.
Very little.
Just a faint dampness on my hands.
Nothing remarkable.
But enough to make me stop.
I looked at my fingers.
I looked at the screen.
Then I looked back at my fingers.
As if they belonged to someone else.
I told myself it was heat.
Stress.
Fatigue.
Anything.
But I knew it was not true.
The room was cold.
Too cold.
Dust floated in front of the monitor.
Tiny particles suspended in the blue light.
My coffee cup was already empty.
The apartment remained silent.
And yet the moisture remained.
I think that was the first time I understood something Sade had grasped centuries ago.
Not that desire is powerful.
That much is obvious.
What is unsettling is that desire rarely arrives in the form we expect.
Sometimes it disguises itself as a question.
As research.
As observation.
As simple interest.
And by the time you realize what is happening, you have already traveled too far to convincingly claim indifference.
I kept reading.
Even though I knew I should close the page.
I kept reading.
Even though I was beginning to feel observed by myself.
I kept reading.
Because every answer produced another question.
And every question seemed to bring me closer to something that did not fit the person I believed myself to be.
There were small holes in the wall beside my desk.
Remnants of old picture frames.
I had never paid attention to them before.
That night I did.
I do not know why.
I stared at them for several seconds.
As if I were trying to escape the screen.
As if I needed to look at anything else.
The plaster had chipped away around the abandoned nails.
The edges of the holes looked darker than the rest of the wall.
I cannot remember how long I spent looking at them.
I only remember that I was still sweating.
And that each new page made me feel a little more uncomfortable.
A little more interested.
A little more exposed.
The hardest part was not accepting what I was reading.
The hardest part was accepting that I wanted to keep reading.
That nobody was forcing me.
That no external pressure existed.
That the curiosity belonged entirely to me.
The screen illuminated the empty room.
The dust still floated in the air.
The wall remained covered with its forgotten holes.
My hands were still damp.
And for the first time I suspected that this was not a passing phase.
That something was beginning.
Something small.
Something quiet.
Something I still did not know how to name.
But something that had already begun to name me.
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 pore stops the record reaching absolute zero I should
