The Shape of Obsession

After Prekshya left that evening, I stayed in the library long after there was any reason to remain. The place had already begun to empty itself out. Chairs slid softly against the floor. A book cart rolled somewhere in the distance. The librarian moved with the weary precision of someone whose body was still present but whose mind had already gone home. Outside, the last light of evening clung weakly to the glass before giving up completely. But I stayed. I sat with a book open in front of me and read nothing. My eyes moved over the same paragraph again and again, but the words refused to enter me. Another name had taken their place. Samir. There was something about him that bothered me in a way I couldn’t dismiss. It wasn’t only Prekshya. That would have been too simple. It was the ease of him. The polish. The confidence that looked effortless because it had been practiced too long. The way he moved like a man who had already been accepted by every room he entered. Men like that always disturbed me. Not because they were perfect, but because they wanted to be seen that way. And perfection is usually where rot learns to dress well. So I opened my laptop. At first, I found exactly what I expected to find. Photographs from community events. Smiles. Handshakes. Blazers. Charity banners. Captions full of words like impact, leadership, vision, and upliftment. The usual performance of goodness. The usual carefully arranged evidence that a man wanted to be mistaken for something larger than himself. People praised him in the comments like he was a savior with excellent lighting. Then I found something older. A fundraiser. He had organized it the previous year. The stated purpose had been noble enough to make questioning it feel almost indecent: raising money to help build a school in Marang, a rural area in Nepal. There were speeches. Posters. Clips of smiling volunteers. Group photos with folded hands and wide grins. Enough sincerity in appearance to fool anyone who only looked once. I kept scrolling. Then I noticed the absence. No updates on the school. No construction photos. No site visits. No foundation being laid. No walls. No workers. No evidence that anything had happened after the applause ended. The fundraiser had happened. The praise had remained. The school had disappeared. I went deeper. A few weeks later, there were photos of Samir in Miami. Rooftop bars. Expensive drinks. White shirts. Neon. Laughter. A man dressed in leisure with the ease of someone spending money that had never made him guilty enough to count it. I sat back slowly and stared at the screen. “Such a loser,” I said under my breath. So this was the real you. There are men who are openly corrupt, and then there are men who wrap selfishness in noble language until even they forget what they are. Samir looked like the second kind. The more dangerous kind. The kind who could steal from faith itself and still have people thanking him for showing up. I closed the laptop. The library windows had darkened by then. The glass reflected the room back at me — shelves, tables, dim lights, my own face suspended faintly over all of it. For a second I looked unreal, like a version of myself caught between becoming and disappearing. Maybe I had been caught there for years. I left the library with a strange calm inside me. Jealousy becomes easier to bear once it finds a moral language. And now mine had one. My alarm rang at seven the next morning. The sound tore through sleep like something mechanical and impatient. I shut it off and lay still for a few seconds, staring at the ceiling while the room slowly admitted morning. Sunlight spilled through the blinds in thin pale bands. Beyond the apartment, the lake behind the building caught the sunrise in pieces, silver trembling over water like something fragile trying to survive the day. My room faced the east perfectly. Sometimes I thought life had a sick sense of humor — arranging beauty so carefully around people it had no intention of comforting. I got up, dressed, and went for a run near La Familia Park. The morning air was sharp enough to sting. My breath turned rhythmic. My feet found the pavement and kept finding it. Step. Breath. Step. Breath. Trees, water, silence, distance. Running always stripped my mind bare. And what was left underneath was never flattering. When I got home, I showered, changed, and drove to work. Commerce Street looked the same as always — glass buildings pretending to matter more than the people inside them, traffic humming like a tired machine, men and women moving quickly enough to convince themselves their movement meant something. QI Solutions stood there in its expensive shell, an AI-powered software company full of ambitious men who liked words like innovation because it made greed sound intelligent. I was good at what I did there. Better than good. At twenty-eight, I was the youngest in rooms filled with men in their late thirties and forties. Young enough to be dismissed, sharp enough to make dismissal expensive. Around ten, Hassan called me over. “Aarav,” he said, still staring at his screen, “I’ve already uploaded all the necessary JSON files into the source folder. I need the submission done by the end of the week.” Hassan had the rare gift of making every ordinary instruction sound like it was descending from heaven. “Sure,” I said. He nodded and walked away, satisfied in the way mediocre men often are when the world keeps mistaking their tone for authority. I watched him go. You didn’t build this company, I thought. You just learned how to stand near importance and speak like some of it rubbed off on you. The day dragged itself across my nerves. Coffee. Code. Meetings that wasted oxygen. Another coffee. A lunch too short to count. By five o’clock, I was done. And the second my monitor went black, another face lit up in my mind. Prekshya. After all the quiet stalking, all the hesitation, all the ridiculous overthinking, I had finally found her Instagram. And that evening, I decided to follow her. I stared at the button longer than any sane man should. Then I pressed it. Nothing dramatic happened. No sound. No visible consequence. Just a button changing color. But something in me shifted anyway. I almost went to the library after work. I didn’t. Instead, I went to the MMA gym. At 6:45, I was already there, trying to beat thought out of muscle and bone. The gym had a cleaner form of violence. Honest violence. Gloves cracking against pads. Sweat darkening the mat. Men hunched over with their hands on their knees, breathing like old engines, then standing back up and giving their bodies away again. My punches landed hard, but measured. My kicks were cleaner than usual. There was less waste in my movement. Even coach noticed. “Better,” he said during drills. “You’re calmer today.” I almost smiled. Calm was not the word for what I felt. But maybe rage, once it finds a direction, begins to look like discipline. After training, I showered and drove home. At 8:38, my phone buzzed. Instagram. I looked down. Prekshya accepted your follow request. Prekshya started following you. For a second, I just stared. Then I smiled without meaning to. Not like a man who had won something. Like a man who had just been given a small permission and had already begun mistaking it for fate. I sat on the edge of my bed and opened her profile. Then the highlights. Then the tagged photos. Then all the small fragments people leave behind when they want to be seen without ever fully revealing themselves. I studied her the way lonely men study the women they’ve already started building inner worlds around. What music she liked. What places she went to. What kind of light she chose for her pictures. What she exposed. What she protected. Then I saw it. A photo in a BMW M4 Competition. She was in the passenger seat. I froze. The same car appeared in Samir’s highlights. Same dashboard. Same interior. Same arrogant machine. I looked back and forth between the two profiles like repetition might somehow produce innocence. No caption said it clearly. But some truths don’t need language. They wait in plain sight and let you wound yourself reaching for certainty. Maybe they were together. Maybe they weren’t. But whatever existed between them was enough to make my chest go tight. Still, I messaged her. So, how’s the book? Seen. I waited. Then her reply came. So once I was told it completely depends on how you want it to be. It is very happy now :) I read the message once. Then again. What does that mean? Friendly? Playful? Cruel without trying to be? I typed, deleted, typed again. Then sent: I can tell through the phone those eyes look happy. The second it left my screen, regret arrived. Too eager. Too obvious. Too much. I stared at the message like shame alone could recall it. A minute later, she replied with a laughing emoji. That helped. And did nothing. Because now I still didn’t know whether I had moved closer to her or simply become amusing. Before doubt could talk me out of it, I typed again. Coffee this Tuesday? Her reply came quickly. Sure, when and where? I leaned back slowly. My heart should have relaxed. Instead, some part of me distrusted how easy it seemed. Nothing I had ever wanted badly had arrived without first making me crawl through something ugly. So when something moved smoothly, I assumed the danger simply hadn’t shown itself yet. Still, excitement drowned suspicion. We picked Tuesday. Tuesday arrived too slowly and then all at once. I woke before my alarm, checked my phone immediately, and lay there staring at it in the dim light like the day itself had become a living thing. Then her message came. Hey Aarav, can’t make it today. We have to reschedule. That was all. Short. Polite. Harmless. And somehow it gutted the morning. It was my day off, and suddenly the whole day felt empty before it had even begun. I told myself not to overreact. People reschedule. Life happens. Nothing had been promised. But disappointment has no respect for logic once hope has already dressed itself and stepped outside. That evening, after MMA, I made a worse decision. I checked Samir’s story. He had posted something seven hours earlier. A photo with someone beside him. The face wasn’t fully visible, but I noticed the hand. A crescent moon tattoo. Prekshya. Something immediate and ugly moved through me. Not heartbreak. Not even pain. Something smaller and meaner. Possession without permission. I felt betrayed, which was absurd. Nothing existed between us that could be betrayed. But the heart is shameless when it wants to turn desire into injury. “She had someone more important than me,” I said aloud. Hearing it made it feel pathetic. An hour later, Samir posted again. A rooftop club somewhere near Dallas. Music. Light. Glass. Bodies pressing against one another in the dark like loneliness wearing confidence. By then I was already too far inside my own thoughts to stop. So I went. I told myself I needed proof. That was a lie. What I really needed was pain sharp enough to take the place of uncertainty. By the time I got there, the rooftop was crowded. Bass moved through the floor like a second heartbeat. Blue and purple light slid across drinks, faces, bare shoulders, expensive clothes. Everyone looked like they were trying to forget themselves in public. I stayed back, hidden among strangers. Samir didn’t see me. I saw him. Laughing. Drinking. Moving through the crowd with that same practiced ease I had already begun to hate. He belonged too easily in every space he entered. Men like him made belonging look natural when really it was just entitlement with better posture. Then I saw her. Not Prekshya. Another woman. White. Blonde hair loose over one shoulder. Maybe five foot five. Slim, elegant, sharp-featured. She had the kind of beauty that looked deliberate, as though every detail had been chosen with care. Even in nightclub light, she looked expensive. Controlled. The kind of woman who knew what effect she had on a room and had grown used to it. Samir leaned closer to her. She smiled. Then he kissed her. And in that instant, everything inside me went still. The music kept going. The lights kept moving. People kept laughing. But something in me stepped back and watched. Not because I loved Prekshya. Not because she had chosen me. But because I knew what this meant. The car. The story. The way he seemed threaded into her life. The easy access. The familiarity. And now this. Samir was exactly what I thought he was. Not just polished. Not just false. Not just another man addicted to admiration. He was the kind of man who could stand in one woman’s orbit and kiss another in public without feeling the slightest fracture in himself. I watched him from across the rooftop, and the disgust that settled into me was so calm it frightened me. So this is who you are. A fraud in public. A fraud in private. A man who collects trust from one place and appetite from another. Then, inevitably, my thoughts turned to Prekshya. Maybe she knew. Maybe she didn’t. But if she didn’t, then this was worse than I had imagined. Because someone like her — someone I had already begun elevating in my mind to a place no real human should be put — did not deserve to become another audience member in Samir’s performance. I stood there in the noise and smoke and fractured light, hidden among strangers, watching him laugh with blonde hair still close to his face like nothing inside him was rotten at all. That was the moment something changed in me. Until then, I had wanted Prekshya. Now, for the first time, I wanted to pull her away from him. Or maybe that was just what obsession calls itself when it wants to sound righteous.