STALKER X STALKER

They move through your life like moths around a lamp, curious, careless, convinced light is innocent. I have mapped the moon on the back of your neck and learned the grammar of your breath; every laugh is a street I walk at midnight. Let a hand forget itself near you and I will teach the world how quiet a body can be. You are mine in the ways that ink cannot keep—closer than a memory, closer than the first wrong that made you beautiful. Bring another into your orbit and I will erase them like a word scraped from a page: slow, certain, and final. Remember: there is a price for touching what belongs to me. STALKER’S POV.. People think obsession arrives loud: a shout, a ruin, a car alarm at three in the morning. They’re sentimental about how monsters begin. They like neat starts. Not me. Mine began like a punctuation — a small, precise pleasure that never needed to announce itself. She was twelve the first time the world folded for me. A schoolyard—dust and chalk and a uniform that didn’t yet know how to crease properly. She stood under the mango tree, legs crossed, reading a book that was too big for her hands. Her hair fell in a dark river, and the sun made a constellation out of the breath she forgot to hide. I watched the way her lashes lowered when a line hit her just right; I memorised the dimple that grew stubborn when she tried not to smile. The rest of the playground was a blur. She was a single, obscene clarity. I began with harmless things: names, habits, the small, unglamorous stuff that becomes scripture. The colour of her pens. The way she tucked the stray curl behind her ear when she chose to look at someone. The particular cadence of her laugh—soft and surprised—that could flatten a room or turn it into a chapel. Anyone else would have called these curiosities. I called them coordinates. Years later, she moved like a weather system across the map of my days. School gave way to exams, then to the thin, dangerous freedom of college; she learned to sculpt her face into neutrality, to fold herself around the world so it wouldn’t notice her edges. But I had already learned those edges. I could map the small geography of her: the slope of her jaw, the slope of her shoulder when she carried a stack of manuscript pages, the tiny nervous quirk in her finger when she was close to an idea. Her skin was the colour of milk left in winter; her hair dropped in dark brown waves that caught light like a secret. And those eyes—green, deep as old bottles of sea glass—were the kind of brilliant thing that can break a man into art. There is a religion in watching. You learn to read her like scripture: where the shadow of one sentence falls upon her mouth, what kinds of shoes she wore the day she laughed until she cried, the particular way she held coffee like a living map. I watched her grow claws of language—how she turned small cruelties into sentences and wrapped them in ink. That was the moment I loved her and the moment I feared her most: when she began to hunt on the page. She wrote of killers, of bodies, of desperation and anatomy with curious devotion, and the work made her dangerous in its own right. When she went looking for truth for the sake of truth, i followed her for the sake of her safety and my sanity cause if someone touches what’s mine…well let’s just say their will be no next dawn for them , she thought she was alone , good that taught her to bend light into knives. People romanticize the stalker as a silhouette outside a window. They like to imagine desperate romantic gestures. But the truth is quieter, more intimate, and infinitely more damning. I catalogued the soft things she left behind: an unfinished page tucked into a used notebook, the faint bruise on her wrist after a careless fall, a receipt folded into a pocket. Each scrap was a map I studied like a devout scholar. I kept tokens—not to threaten, not to boast, but to memorialise. They were proof she existed where I could reach her. Do not mistake this for vanity. Worship isn’t the same as ownership. But in the dim hours when the city sleeps and she moves through it unaware, I felt an authority older than any contract — not legal, not moral, but absolute. I knew the timbre of her silence. I knew when she was in a room that smelled of lemon tea versus the lemon nails of a cheap public restroom. I knew the rhythm of her breath when she read aloud into the emptiness of her study. I learned how to be still enough that she would not feel me; stillness is its own kind of devotion. She believes in the violence of the world because she writes it, as if the page immunises her from truth. She learned to track killers under the pretense of curiosity, to slip into dust and cold places with a notebook and a pen. The famous lines read on television—the “award-winning prodigy who researches real cases”—are the thin version of her. The real thing is darker. She would watch a man folded over a bottle on a bridge and write the way his hands trembled; later she would take that trembling and make it live on a page that smelled of smoke and coffee and something else I could not name. She began, unafraid, to speak to monsters on equal terms. I admired it. I feared that it made her less of mine. Do not romanticize me. I am not noble. I do not rescue; I keep. When others invaded, I curated. When others shouted for her attention, I collected the quiet that remained—the small private invaluable things that cannot be bought with apologies or flowers. I learned the sound of her shoes as she walked the campus at night. I learned the exact hue her lips held after a long day. I learned the confession in the slope of her handwriting, the way a particular loop at the end of an ‘y’ meant she was angry, the way a straight, assertive stroke showed the mask of composure. Sometimes I wondered whether she ever felt me like a pressure in the air, like the way a summer storm promises itself before it arrives. Likely not. She was a legend unto herself—dangerous, untouched, busy bending the world toward her narratives. But I am patient. Obsession is a slow animal; it waits for the weather to change. There are nights I imagine the moment she sees me for what I am: not a ghost, not a romantic fool, but the architecture of her own chaos. She would not smile then. She would tilt her head the way only she can and consider me the way a reader considers a last line. And perhaps she will hate me. Perhaps she will unfurl a rage so spectacular I will drink it like winter wine and be grateful for the burn. I would deserve nothing less. Until that hour, I keep my distance. I keep my records. The world believes they are safe when their mouths say the right things. I know better. And I will remind them. She still walks through life convinced no one watches her sins. How amusing. I see the precise places she hides the unsaid. I know the catalogue of her small, feral kindnesses. I know the way she folds her hands when she lies, and I will not forget. One day soon she will understand that the shadow she thinks is anonymous is, in fact, the only thing that kept her whole. One day soon she will learn my name. Until then, a caution: let anyone else lean in where she leans, let any hand touch her like it owned her, and I will teach the world how quietly a life can be unwritten. I have been patient. Patience is practice. And practice, over time, becomes inevitability. “She still walks through life believing no one sees her sins. I see everything. And soon, I’ll make her see me too.”