The Nature of the Obsessive Personality

‘The ones that stick are the ones that stay’, you had said, the shadows combing through your hair at the height of midnight. How delightfully mediocre, I had thought, though it was true, of course. I held your hand and looked into your eyes, imagining our lives together, sipping tea and making love on a Wednesday.

My mind would formulate such exceptional thoughts that would push the red gunge around my body at an accelerated pace, yet as soon as they had come, they would be gone. You would smile and nod at me as I fell about on the floor, consumed by brilliance, but your sharp disinterest resting on the back of my head would prevent me from weeping my creative grief into your mouth, the mindless stories you had swallowed a thousand times before.

Something had stayed, however, floating at the back of my mind- a thought about you. It had survived amongst the explosions of haircuts, and tattoos which had never graced my skin. Ideas erupted like fires down my spine, leaving my bones as ash, exhausted from the short-lived flames of passion. Pictures never taken, cutlery never purchased; dreams that died in the electrical pulses of the synapse, dulled by the crushing distance between fantasy and tedium. Nothing could stick like my thought of you. It had existed since the day we had first met, today it would be realised.

I called you upstairs, wearing the Sesame Street lingerie I had never really liked. I looped the hoover pipe over your neck and pushed you down the stairs. As you struggled to breathe, I tried to remember the technical name of the hoover pipe, but failed miserably. Not that it mattered, it was a decent method of strangulation and was serving its purpose. I stood over you and poured vinegar in your eyes until they started bleeding, and then made them pop with a satisfying noise by prodding them gently with a wooden spoon. You weren’t quite dead so I began to tear open your stomach with my hands, removing the contents of your stomach and forcing it all down your throat with the extra glaze of your stomach acid. Delicious, I’m sure. The gurgling noise which came from your mouth more than made up for the mess on the carpet. I turned on the hoover and watched as the vibrating tube gradually blocked off your windpipe, before suddenly deciding on the type of cutlery I was going to buy.

‘The ones that stick are the ones that stay’, you had said.