At the beginning, before I blamed myself, before the rage and the resentment, I just cried. Tears mixing with the snot flowing out of my nose, getting everywhere, attempting to vacate the failing system of my body. It was a shut-down, plain and simple. I couldn’t believe it. How could these past years lead up to this? What went wrong?

It was her eyes, their shade of burnt ochre that burned its way into my mind. It was when she gazed into my eyes that we embraced for the first time. That’s when I knew. It was not merely their color, but the immeasurable depth of her eyes that filled me with an equally immeasurable sense of awe. All around us was squall, but she was shelter.

The world was a sensory overload, blinding, chaotic, unforgiving, unrelenting. The only reaction that occurred to me was to cry. So I did. Oceans rolled out from my eyes and she was there to calm the tide. She was able to transform the cacophonous carillons crashing in my head into melody.  When all seemed lost, she knew just how to find it.

Kent sat by Caroline’s bedside, stroking her blonde hair, coarse as the straw mattress upon which she slept. The creases in his face were exaggerated by the morning sun, its orange light splitting through the windows which had long before been boarded up. He gathered another handful of her hair and ran his fingers through it as she slept, as she shivered without end. His mouth was curled into a frown, as it had been all morning since he had awoken. His aching muscles felt like they’d been pulled into a grimace ever since she first started showing symptoms. She hadn’t been getting any better the past few days, not even with the medicine. He stopped stroking her hair and grabbed the damp cloth from the wash-basin at the foot of his chair, wiping away the sweat on her fevered forehead. Replacing the cloth to the cool water of the basin, he removed the bloody bandages from her forearm and looked at her wound. Over a week and the infection still hadn’t died down. Pus festered around the lesion and it smelt of rot. Maybe Charles’ medicine couldn’t help her. No, it had to. Kent tossed the blood-stained rags across the room and re-wrapped her arm with some rags next to the water basin, making sure to tie them tight.

Let me tell you something, man.

People say that obsession is extreme dedication, that it’s love and devotion on a huge scale. No no no no no. Obsession is a fucking snake. I’ve seen it.

And you’ll see it, too. Next time you think about that new video game you bought, or that new album you started listening to, or that smoking hot chick who sits across from you in Ethics. The next time you think about any of those things, just look carefully around you, and you’ll see it. You’ll see it coiling around, surrounding you like a never-ending storm. And you wait for the tail to come and for that giant goddamn snake to just end. But it doesn’t. It just keeps going and going, until it’s completely surrounded you on all sides, until all you can see are it’s fucking scales and all you can feel is dark and cold, like being buried in snow.