Obsession: A Dark Love Story
by Ashley Kim
Ashley Kim is a champion for women, blending years of digital marketing experience with her passion for helping female business owners embrace their online presence and thrive. She’s also a fiction writer, crafting stories that celebrate resilience, humor, magic, and the emotional experiences that make up life. When she’s not working or writing, Ashley enjoys time with her family, her fluffy Doxiepoo, and cozy backyard fires, no matter the weather.
It’s kind of ugly. This thing I’m holding. But I want to keep it so badly. I’d kill my own mother just to keep it. Glancing around for threats, I refuse to let it leave my desperate grasp. Euphoria and fear clash under my skin, like churning waves in a storm, turning my organs into a twisted mess.
No one warns you about the obsession that comes with these things. The darkness that starts in your stomach, grows to surround your heart, and settles with awareness behind your eyes.
Watching and waiting.
People come and go. They all smile, clueless and showing too many teeth. They stand around chatting about how this thing I’m holding is a blessing. How it’ll make me want to be a better person.
But no one talks about how it will change me for the worse. No one warned me that holding this thing would cause irreversible damage. That I’d undergo a sudden, drastic metamorphosis.
I sit here, as quietly as possible, hoping no one notices that I now have a terrifying beast living under my skin. My bones ache with knowing that I can easily slip out of my old skin at any moment and transform into every monster these people were raised to fear.
Looking down, I hope my eyes don’t give me away as I feel my face reconstructing from watchful observer to alert predator. I sit in this small room, full of its noises and people, stunned to realize I’d have no remorse destroying this room and everyone in it … destroying full cities if I had to.
I’d do anything it told me to.
It has a physical grip on me … but it feels right. Necessary. Looking down again in awe, I realize there’s only one thing to do now – name her. “Welcome to this world, baby girl.”
THE END