Obsessed

by Serena Akeroyd

She tormented me with her beauty, reminded me of everything I couldn’t have anymore. She tortured me with her friendly smiles, and made me miserable when I thought about how similar she was to another woman who’d made me suffer along the way.

Even though she was my everything.

But to her, I was and always would be nothing. Someone in the shadows her light couldn’t touch. Someone too dark, too hideous to ever be loved by someone like her.

Maybe I was hard on her, maybe I was bitter—even monsters had feelings.

People didn’t give credit to stalkers, and they should. That level of dedication couldn’t be bought.

She was a woman, all woman. My woman. She just didn’t know it, and she never would either.

“I mean that the pain is your love for her. It won’t die, it will only blossom with time as she becomes a part of your memories. But the pain and the love make them more deeply entrenched in your soul.”

The Japanese believed in kintsugi. That a piece of pottery didn’t lose value once it was broken. If anything, it gained it. A broken pot, for example, was bound together with a special gold lacquer, highlighting the flaws, celebrating the imperfections, reforging it so that it was useful once more. She did that to me. Sank into every crack in my nature, bound herself to every broken shard, making me a better man than I was before. Not new, not perfect, but if anything, perfectly imperfect for her.

God, I wanted her to claim me, because that would make me as much hers as she was mine.

“Not all knights come to their damsels squeaky clean and bright white.”