Stalker

For anyone wondering, this person is no longer in my life, and this piece was written a long time ago.

He came back to me like memory does. Uninvited, unclean, and far too precise to be coincidence. A name I hadnt spoken in years, a face that had dulled in the soft corrosion of time, suddenly sharpened into color like a photo developed in reverse. It began with a message. Just text on a screen, ordinary as breath. But it didnt feel like a beginning. It felt like a culmination. A slow reveal of something that had been happening long before I noticed it

There had always been something about him. Even in that brief half hour of adolescent theater, when our lives touched for the first time, he moved like a man who had already seen the inside of too many burning buildings. We were children cosplaying philosophers, lobbing clever phrases like fireworks. I remember little, but I imagine I was in a war with myself to seem smarter, better, more intelligent than he imagined. But he had the real weaponry. Not charm. Not wit. Depth. Depth so profound it felt dangerous. I didnt see it then. I do now.

He spoke to me like he was taking notes on my soul. Like he was already writing a dossier. As if he had waited, patient and calculating, in some trench of memory, buried in time, just to begin the excavation Every sentence he sent carried the weight of reconnaissance. His language was strange and elegant, like a raven pecking at poetry, a priest blessing a crime scene

He said I was the personification of the seductiveness of self destruction. He said I was doom. And beautiful in the way collapse is beautiful when youre not standing beneath it. A glorified version of the twin towers crumbling. Tragic, yes, but sublime if you werent inside. I was disaster romanticized.

What a terrifying thing it is to be understood. Seen, down to the core.

Not adored. Not wanted. Not even loved. Understood. The kind of understanding that strips you of all your illusions and demands the raw, unfiltered debris. He looked into me like a war journalist peers through rubble. Not searching for survivors, but searching for truth. For blood in the mortar. For evidence of the fire that started it all.

The strangest part was being seen not as a person, but as an idea. I was sculpted into metaphor. Framed into fiction. He took my edges and bent them into the shape of a myth. A woman with someone elses mind, someone elses history. I became a cipher, a theory. And somehow, I found comfort in that. Because the truth is, I had been doing that to myself for years. Living as an echo of something I never was

And then I realized it.

I had been watched.

Not in the cheap, clumsy way most people do it. Not the voyeuristic hunger of late night profile scrolling. No. He watched like a scholar watches scripture. Like a sniper waits for movement. Slowly. Relentlessly. With reverence. He studied the spaces between my words. He memorized the shape of my lies. I was a text annotated in red ink. A body scanned and reconstructed through language alone. He was a stalker of minds. An intellectual predator. A cartographer of contradiction

There is a kind of stalking that is holy. That does not chase the body, but haunts the soul. He did not watch where I walked. He watched what I said and what I didnt. He watched the rhythms of my thought, the moments I shifted tone, the inconsistencies in speech. He followed me through memory, not maps. Through language, not location. He wove my identity from discarded phrases and unfinished thoughts, like some deranged god building a temple from debris.

I had thought I was so careful. So well-armored in irony, humor, aloofness. But he found the rot beneath the polish. The fatal glitch in my design. I was a gilded Baphomet, hollow and gleaming, and he saw through it all like glass.

He told me he had a death wish. I believed him. But I also believed he had found something in me that made that wish make sense. I wasnt a solution. I was a metaphor for the end. I was the bullet with a name carved into it.

I dont understand the death wish. Not in the way he spoke of it. But what I do understand is, the feeling of being seen so precisely it feels like a weapon. His eerily accurate analysis held its own kind of violence. The kind that lures you in. The kind that dismantles you gently. There was something in the way he observed me that mirrored my own undoing. His words carried the same weight a death wish does. I think he saw in me a soft destruction. A way to die without ever stopping breath.

He was chasing an ending, and I was shaped like one. But the ending was empty. Like a black hole, all gravity and no substance. A beautiful deception. Because I do not care about people the way they care about me. Being drawn to me is like stepping into war with no clear enemy. You dont know if youll come out alive. You suspect you wont. But you enter anyway, because the smoke is beautiful and the cause feels magnetic.

There is nothing sacred here. There is nothing to be studied. I am easy to understand to the right kind of mind. But most people dont look closely enough. He did. And now I believe I take up corners of his mind that maybe were filled with slow, less intriguing thoughts before. Is that bad? Im unsure.

He did not touch me. He did not speak to me. He didnt need to. His words were a siege. They infiltrated gently, like water in stone, until the cracks appeared. And I opened. Not willingly. Inevitably.

I do not know what I am to him. A mirror. A myth. A wound in human form. A bandage he hoped would keep him from bleeding out. Maybe just a relic from a version of himself he couldnt bury. He wanted to be dismantled by something he could understand. And something of that caliber doesnt come around often for someone like him.

But I cant help feeling guilty. My game is not your battlefield. It is pain and deceit. It is smoke and misdirection. There is no honor here, no dignity. You will not come out in victory. Not with me. I do not offer resolution. Only recursion. Only ruin.

I cant help myself though. He is the first person who ever looked at the battlefield of me and didnt flinch. He mapped it. Named the ruins. Signed and dated it like a soldier returning to the wreckage years after the war.

And I cannot decide whether I was the terrain or the weapon, I can only pray that he doesnt seek out people like me often.