Threads of Obsession

Introduction

I needed her carnally. I was a starved dog, gnawing at the marrow of hunger, drooling for the texture of her skin peeling against my tongue. She didn't know my name, perhaps not even my shadow, yet I harvested the smallest crevices of her life like a parasite hollowing out an animal: her birthdate, middle name, breakfast order, the mental illnesses that shadowed her father—the cruelty of his hand. There was no respite for my appetite. I needed to consume her every aspect, absorb her life and preserve it in my flesh. To quench the roars of my thirst, she was to be injected into my veins, my final words in the form of her name engraved into my steaming skin. Her essence burning like a plague as her drug permeates my body, spreading like an infection. There was no end to my lust; it perpetuated like the earth's rotation, relentless and foreboding.

    My love didn't follow a natural progression. It never mellowed into tender affection—only mutilated me until I ached. I was stripped of my value; all that remained of me was the shadow she cast, the remnants of her presence left behind. She was the syringe lodged in my veins, the pills that gave me life. Without her, I would crumble, until the only fragments left of me remained buried beneath her house, strands of my hair pressed into the earth, offerings that lay silent.

    My obsession began on September 3rd, 2004, at 5:14 p.m. That was the minute my eyes first devoured her body, branding it into my skull, entering the coffin that rests in my mind. She was a sculpture that pierced through the world and its filth, shadowing over us feral animals, a blanket that covered the ugly.

    She alone could fulfill my prophecy. She alone was fated to be threaded at my side. The inevitable day our bodies intertwine, stitching together our remains, will be the day I may finally rest. What more could I ask for than to have the woman I long for lying beside me, our lungs collapsing in unison as our veins merge into one river—our final strings of life, once sewn together, unraveling into the same grave as our spirits drift in perpetuity.

     I watched her sleep. To be intimate with a woman so powerful came an ache without a cure, an insatiable want for her presence. It throbbed and flooded until I found myself in her vicinity, feet planted in the floors of her house, my eyes fixed on her slumber. Cameras concealed in her room could not sate me, could not offer the same sensation. I had to see my jewel in person, a trophy that lacked its audience. The light of her complexion on my screen only starved me further, taunting my desperate howls. My eyes begged to watch her, observe her—the rapid flicker of her eyelids as she dreamt, the twitch of her fingers as her nightmares swallowed and consumed.

    Each time I crept in, I executed my plan without flaw, perfected by repetition, fueled by longing. Our bodies never came into direct contact. I never needed to. With every visit, her skin seared into my vision as I inhaled her sleep, the smell of her perfume suffocating me—its scent a gas I sought to breathe. The rise and fall of her breath was a lullaby I didn't deserve, a song that lured me in. I never stayed long, only enough to stand in the shadow of her world, to let it settle into me.

    Drawn by something deeper than desire, I collected relics of her as proof of our communion: the strands of hair I could weave into my altar, the necklaces she left behind becoming the chains binding me to her memory. Most sacred of them all, the pearly whites harvested from her mother's drawer, fragments of her childhood body—bones that once crowned her smile. Her teeth sat displayed in my shrine, grinning back at me as I whispered to them in the dark, reciting prayers as if her soul might seep into them, answering me back.

    Not only did I collect, but I also bestowed, and with such devotion came sacrifice. As tokens of my love, I delivered dead rodents to her doorstep, twitching bodies silenced by my hands. The bodies quieted by devotion—flesh captured in her honor—I prayed she might worship. Prayed she might worship the treasures passed onto her, the trinkets covered in my tracks. The thought alone made me squirm, pulsing my writhe, arousing me. I wanted her to cherish my gifts, savor the feeling of their skin, the textures on their rotting tongues.

    With the wrath of her hands, I wanted her to harm me, the same harm inflicted on the animals that lay deceased on her door step. For her hands to scar me, digging into my skin with those delicate nails, piercing through my layers—my wounds becoming the tangible tissue in my arms, my love made flesh. If she chose to impose suffering, I would receive it as if it were a benediction, welcoming the suffocation, the misery that drowned. Her cruelty would be my euphoria, and I didn't care. I savored the pain, every last drop of it.