Permanence

***Content Warning: This story contains depictions of stalking, domestic violence, gaslighting, and lethal violence. It involves the perspective of an obsessive abuser. Reader discretion is strongly advised.***

It’s funny how life works sometimes. Not funny in the way people mean when they laugh, more like the kind of funny that makes your stomach tighten because you realize, too late, that you missed the moment things changed.

It takes so many twists and turns that you don’t even notice where you’re standing. You look down and the ground isn’t the ground you remember. The air smells different. The walls are closer. And you tell yourself it’s fine, that you’re still on the same path.

But life doesn’t ask. Sometimes it takes you somewhere you never thought possible, and the more you swim against the current, the harder it becomes. Not because you’re weak. But because the current has already decided where you belong.

And the more you fight it, the more it pushes you back.

It sounds stupid, like I’m preaching that destiny was settled from the start, like everything is written down somewhere in neat little lines. I don’t believe that. I’m a passionate atheist—always have been. I like to think we make our own meaning, carve our own way through the dark. Cause and effect. Choices. Consequences.

But it’s hard to keep that belief clean when the world keeps shoving you toward the same spot, again and again, until you start to wonder if it isn’t luck at all—if it’s a hand on your shoulder, steering.

It happens with everything, really. You take a different route to work and still end up behind the same rusted sedan with the same dented bumper, like the city rearranged itself while you weren’t looking. You switch your lunch break, you change floors, you start drinking your coffee outside just to avoid one person and somehow they’re there anyway, leaning in the doorway at the exact second you look up. You block a number, delete it, swear you’re done… and then it rings from a “No Caller ID,” and your stomach drops because the timing is perfect. Too perfect.

You try to start over in small way, new gym, new habits, new version of yourself and the old life finds you like a scent on your clothes, tugging you back by the collar. You can change the surface of things all you want, but underneath, the current still knows your name.

And then there are the things you don’t talk about. The patterns that feel too precise. The coincidences that arrive with timing so sharp it stops being coincidence. The moments that make you pause mid-step, because for a second you swear you’re hearing something you shouldn’t—something familiar, soft, and low on the door.

Like today.

Strange, isn’t it? After all these years of circling each other from opposite sides of the world, pretending distance was the same thing as safety. After everything we did, after everything we took from each other, life still finds a way to press us into the same room, at the same hour, under the same buzzing lights, as if it’s been arranging the furniture for this moment all along.

You don’t have to answer. Your face already did.

I never expected it. Not here. Not you.

Look at you.

You’re so cold.

Not the kind of cold that comes from winter—this is something deeper, something practiced. The way you hold your shoulders like armor. The way your eyes refuse to settle, flicking past me as if looking directly would make it real. As if meeting my gaze might open a door you’ve spent years barricading.

And maybe that’s what this is. A door.

Because I can feel it in the air, the old pressure, that familiar tightening in the stomach, the sense that the room is smaller than it should be. Like the walls have leaned in to listen. Like the current has finally brought us back to the exact spot it wanted, no matter how hard we swam.

You know… when we separated, I didn’t understand it. Not at first. I kept replaying the last weeks in my head, hunting for the exact sentence, the exact look, the exact moment something cracked. I told myself it had to be a misunderstanding—something small that had swollen into something bigger, the way a tiny cut can start bleeding and suddenly you’re staring at your own hands like they belong to someone else.

But then I got home.

And the space you left behind explained everything.

Your toothbrush gone. The drawer empty. The hangers on your side of the closet spaced out like missing teeth. Even the little things, the mug you always used, the paperback with the bent spine, the sweater you hated but wore anyway because it was soft, vanished so cleanly it felt rehearsed.

That’s when I understood.

You didn’t love me the way I loved you.

And before you say anything, before you try to soften it, let me be clear: I would’ve done anything for you. I’m not using that word lightly. I mean anything. Whatever it took to keep you close, to keep you safe, to keep you from slipping away into a world that doesn’t know how to take care of things that matter.

And I did. I tried. I did my best.

Those months when I didn’t know where you lived—who you were with, what kind of rooms you slept in, what kind of hands were allowed near you—those were the hardest months of my life. People talk about missing someone as if it’s a gentle ache. This wasn’t gentle. It was a constant pressure behind my ribs, a buzzing under my skin. Every day felt slightly wrong, like walking on a floor that’s been tilted just enough to make you nauseous.

So I looked.

Countless sleepless nights. Coffee that went cold in my hands. Streets that all started to look the same. I followed the trails you left without realizing you’d left them—familiar cars, familiar voices, familiar routines. I watched your friends without letting them see me watching. I trailed your family at a distance that felt safe to me and probably would’ve felt like a nightmare to anyone else.

I told myself it wasn’t obsession.

I told myself it was devotion.

And then, oh… then, when I finally found you…

You were just as beautiful.

Not the bright, easy beautiful people notice in passing. A quieter kind. The kind that sits under the skin and makes you feel chosen and doomed at the same time. You stood there like nothing had happened, like you hadn’t ripped yourself out of my life and left only an outline behind.

And for a second, I couldn’t breathe.

Because the current hadn’t lost you after all. It had only been taking its time. And now it brought you back to me—because that’s where you belong.

So I started living my days around you, the way a planet learns its orbit. Before work. After work. Sometimes in between, if I could invent a reason. I would wait where I could see your building without being seen myself, watching for the smallest proof that you were there: a light clicking on behind the glass, the brief sway of a curtain, the faint outline of you moving through a room that wasn’t supposed to contain you.

I learned your life in fragments. In reflections. In the way your window would glow and then go dark. In the way the world would hold its breath when your silhouette passed—just a shape, just shadow, and yet it made my mouth go dry.

And I told myself that was enough.

I told myself I could love you like that: at a distance, careful and quiet, as if devotion was something you could practice without ever touching the thing you worshipped.

But distance does strange things to love. It doesn’t shrink it. It concentrates it.

There were days—nights—when I found myself closer than I meant to be. When the air around your door felt warmer, as if it remembered you. When the building seemed to lean open, welcoming, the way a mouth does before it speaks. I would step inside and stand very still, letting the scent of you settle into me, your perfume in the hallway, your laundry in the dark, the faint ghost of your skin on fabric.

I would rest my head where your head had been. In the shallow dent of your pillow. I would breathe until it felt like my lungs had learned your name.

Your clothes, hanging there, innocent, silent—were the closest thing to you I was allowed. I held them to my face, pressed them to my mouth, not because I wanted cloth, but because I wanted whatever was left of you in it. Whatever the day had rubbed off and forgotten. Whatever part of you the world hadn’t stolen from me yet.

Just to get closer. Just to remind myself you were real. Just to remind myself that you would come back to where you belong.

My love.

It feels like an admission now, like something I’ve been holding in my chest for too long, something that’s started to rot because I wouldn't let the air touch it.

Look at you.

You’re so cold. So pale.

Your lips aren’t as red as they used to be. Your cheeks have lost that soft pink flush—the one that always made you look alive even when you were tired. For a moment, that should’ve frightened me. It should’ve made me step back, made me ask questions I don’t want answers to.

But it doesn’t.

Because none of that matters anymore, not now that we’re finally together again.

And you still smell the same.

Kind of.

It’s there, underneath everything—your perfume, or what’s left of it, that familiar note that used to cling to the collar of your coat and the hollow of your throat. But certain things have changed. There’s something else woven through it now. Something sharp. Something clean. Like soap that’s been rinsed too hard. Like metal left out in the rain.

It’s strange what the body remembers. Stranger what it accepts.

And I can tell, by the way you won’t meet my eyes, that you already know what I’m doing. You already know why I’m talking like this. Not to convince you.

To convince myself.

To make it sound like a story with a beginning and an end, instead of what it really is: a circle closing.

But maybe it is a new beginning.

Of course, they’ll hate it. Of course, they’ll look at us and decide they know the whole story from a glance. People always do. They’ll dress their disgust up as concern. They’ll call it worry. They’ll call it protection. They’ll call it anything that lets them feel righteous.

They’ll call me obsessive. They’ll call you submissive.

They’ll say I’m the sickness and you’re the symptom. They’ll build a neat little picture where I’m the monster and you’re the helpless thing in the corner, because that version is easier for them to swallow. It keeps the world tidy. It gives them a place to point their fingers so they don’t have to look at themselves.

But they’ll judge us because they don’t understand us.

Because we’re different. Because we love differently than they do.

Most people love like it’s a hobby, something they pick up and put down when it becomes inconvenient. They love with conditions, with polite distances, with rules that keep their hands clean.

We don’t.

We love with everything we have. We love with passion, with fear, with anger because real love isn’t gentle all the time. Real love has teeth. It clings. It marks. It refuses to be erased.

And if they can’t understand that… then they were never meant to.

You don’t need to answer me. I can see it on your face, behind your eyes, tucked in the tightness of your jaw, in the way you hold your breath like you’re afraid the wrong exhale will tip something over.

You think I’m being crazy again.

You think these are just words. Pretty, desperate words—empty things people say when they want to sound sincere, when they want to buy time, when they want to be forgiven without earning it.

But they aren’t empty. Not to me.

I’ve already broken so many promises to you. I know that. I know the list. I know the weight of it. I’ve carried it for years, even when I pretended I hadn’t. Even when I smiled and told myself it was necessary, that it was love, that it was fate.

But not this time.

I’m not leaving your side. Not now. Not ever.

And look at your hair… your pretty hair. It’s all tangled up, messy in that way it used to get when you came in from the rain, when you’d shake your head and laugh like the world couldn’t touch you. You always hated it like that. You always wanted it clean, soft, back where it belonged.

I’ll help you.

Later, I’ll help you.

We’ll get you into a warm bath. Too hot at first, then perfect. I’ll be gentle. I’ll wash you the way you deserve to be washed, as if this is care and not a confession. I’ll rinse the dried blood from your hair, all of it, because we can’t start again with stains.

Not if this is going to be our new beginning.

Oh I know, eventually they’ll come.

The same ones who told you to get a restraining order. The same ones who leaned close and whispered their little labels—manipulating, abusing, isolating, like naming a thing is the same as understanding it.

They’ll come with concerned faces and righteous hands. They’ll knock the way police knock, hard, high on the door, loud enough for neighbors who don’t even know our names. They’ll say they’re here to help. They’ll say they’re here to save you. And they’ll try to pull us apart again, using the same rehearsed arguments, the same tidy story where I’m nothing but a warning.

They’ll call me violent. Aggressive. They’ll talk about my temper like it’s a weapon I polish for fun.

But you know what it really is.

I tell myself it’s passion. I tell myself it’s too much love packed into a body that doesn’t know where to put it. I tell myself I never meant to hurt you, even when my hands proved otherwise. I tell myself the apologies mattered because I cried afterward, because I broke down, because I begged, because I promised it wouldn’t happen again.

And you forgave me.

That’s the part they never understand. That you forgave me, and in that forgiveness I heard permission. I heard belonging. I heard the world go quiet and make room for us.

Oh, my love… look at you.

Your lips have gone blue. Your skin is cold, too cold, like the warmth simply decided it was done and slipped away without making a sound. But don’t worry. I’m not leaving you. I’ll be here when they come, and I’ll still be here when they leave, because that’s what I do. I stay. I endure. I keep what’s mine.

Even though you tried to push me away… I forgave you, too.

I know you can’t answer right now. I know you’re… quiet in a way you’ve never been before. I know you’re a little bit dead.

But I also know you.

And I know you would forgive me again. You would forgive me for what I did, because you always did. You would forgive the moment my hand stopped shaking. You would forgive the choice I made when I brought the blade close and pressed it where your life was softest, because in my head it wasn’t cruelty.

It was permanence.

It was the only way to make sure they couldn’t take you from me again.