Addiction

Humans and their tendency to get addicted to the strangest of things.

He awoke one morning, as he had every morning, with the certainty that she had sent him a message while he slept. The phone lay inert on the bedside table, a mute oracle; he lifted it with trembling hands, only to find nothing new. The silence was oppressive, though it was also nothing new. Hours passed in a haze of hope and anxiety, each second stretching longer than the one before, as if time itself had turned against him. He did not think of sleep, or food, or work. He thought only of her.

Her face he dared not focus on for long, for fear of the tug upon his heart when he did. Her voice—he could hear, it did not hurt as much—was alive, vibrating, no longer reachable, echoing from a distance. He recalled her laughter, spontaneous, seemingly at nothing, puncturing his life with sudden, bright points of meaning. He had loved her then, and he loved her still, with a love unmanageable, uncontainable, and perhaps unrecognized to him then, destructive.

Those days, the streets outside were a blur of faceless people and leaning buildings, as if the city itself were watching, judging, confining him. He tried to walk to the office, but every block twisted impossibly; corridors narrowed, streetlights flickered like signals from some unseen machinery. He imagined her walking somewhere among the crowd, her steps hidden in the folds of the city, and it seemed the city conspired to erase him. Every man or woman he passed could have been her but never was. Each misrecognition was both relief and torment. His gaze became compulsive, obsessive; he could not stop searching.

Messages. The memory of messages. Even when she did not write, he remembered each one in sequence: “How are you?” “I thought of you today.” “Do you remember…?” Each word was a needle into his veins, precise and merciless. He could not resist them; he would check his phone for hours. Every notification caused his pulse to spike, and every non-notification caused it to sink. It was not merely love—though love existed in it—it was addiction, as if her attention were a drug he could not refuse.

Sometimes he imagined confronting her, telling her he was sick, that he needed her more than air itself. But the thought was unbearable. To speak might destroy the delicate suspension that allowed him to survive each day. Yet to wait was also torment. He existed in a loop, where presence and absence were indistinguishable, where hope and despair oscillated endlessly. He was certain that if he could only see her, touch her, hear a single word meant only for him, he could be made whole again. Yet he feared that this desire, if satisfied, would consume him entirely.

He watched her through windows, doors, reflections, knowing each act was meaningless and absurd. The reflections never changed; she was always elsewhere. Every fleeting image of her with another man—another lover, another friend—was both unbearable and necessary. It confirmed her existence, confirmed that he had been loved in some way, even if it was not enough, even if it was already too late. His heart ached physically; he felt it pressing against his ribs, demanding recognition.

He tried rationalization. Perhaps it was not love, he told himself, but obsession. Perhaps it was the thrill of longing he craved, the imagined proximity that never bore fruit. But even as he spoke these words, he felt their falsity. Love existed here, undeniably. It was not a convenient story or a chemical dependency—it was a truth that refused to leave him. And yet addiction was real, layered upon it, a parasite transforming intimacy into torment. He loved her, and that love had become a cage.

He tried to break the cycle. He deleted her number. He blocked her. Each action came with nausea, tremors, and despair. For days he could not sleep. He could not eat. His thoughts were invaded by phantom notifications, imagined messages, half-remembered phrases. The world became thin, unreal, as if existence itself tested the limits of his endurance. Withdrawal was not merely physical but ontological. He did not know who he was without her, did not recognize his reflection in the mirror.

Yet the desire remained, stubborn and vivid. He longed to feel her warmth again, to hear her voice, to be recognized not as a fragment or a shadow, but as a person loved. The paradox tortured him: he loved her, he loved her too much, and he could not contain that love. It was a fire consuming a house built of paper, a wound that would not close.

One evening, wandering the streets aimlessly, he saw her. She stood beneath the amber glow of a streetlamp, hair spilling like liquid light over her shoulders. With her was another man—lean, laughing, familiar in a way that made the sight impossible. They moved together in a choreography he could not interrupt, hands brushing, eyes meeting in private signals closed to him. His chest constricted, as though the city itself pressed upon him, narrowing alleys and stairwells to suffocation.

He watched, invisible and trembling, heart hammering with the certainty that every gesture between them was betrayal, yet utterly innocent to her. He imagined countless ways to intervene, to speak, to reclaim some part of her—but every imagined action dissolved into absurdity. To call out would be futile; she would not see him, or if she did, she would not care. Worse: she moved on, lived, laughed, existed without him. He was outside, looking in, a ghost imprisoned in a body barely his own.

Days passed in a fugue of longing and despair. He reread every message, every text, every image, as if decoding a secret map back to her. Yet the pain of seeing her with another did not abate. Sleep offered no reprieve; dreams were landscapes of her laughter, entwined with the stranger, always just beyond reach.

The breaking point was a text, when his heart could no longer bear the guillotine hanging above him, swinging with invisible hands. He sent her a message, hands trembling as if the simple act of typing might fracture him entirely:

"A r e y o u o k a y?"

Minutes passed. Then hours. The phone lay inert, accusatory. He refreshed it obsessively, hoping it might yield salvation. Finally, a single word appeared: “Seen.” Nothing else. No comfort, no acknowledgment, no recognition of the storm inside him. When a reply came, hours later, it was brief, hollow—a few words strung together without warmth or intent.

He stared at the screen, the weight of indifference pressing down like a concrete slab. The realization struck him fully: she did not care. Not anymore. Her attention, when it came, was incidental, casual, utterly incapable of soothing the fire in him. This was not merely rejection—it was a mirror reflecting his own obsession back with stark clarity. The love he had carried, infinite and unassailable, now existed in a vacuum where it could only consume him.

In desperation, he sought help. Not from doctors or friends, but from a place he had glimpsed once in a dimly lit church: a circle of chairs, people confessing their addictions aloud. He hesitated; he was not an alcoholic, gambler, or drug user. Yet perhaps here he could confess the truth. Perhaps he could speak of his addiction and survive.

The room smelled faintly of disinfectant and sweat, a smell that made him feel alive and human. He sat, listening to the rhythm of suffering and recovery. When his turn came, he spoke:

"I am addicted to a person I love."

No nods, no understanding, only quiet acknowledgment. The words themselves were a release, a small exhalation of air held for years. He realized then that love and addiction were not opposites, but overlapping circles. Naming the compulsion was a necessary first step toward reclaiming himself. He did not stop loving her, nor wish to. But he began to understand that love untampered by its consequences was not love at all, but self-annihilation.

In the weeks that followed, he instituted rules, small and absurd: no checking his phone before sunrise, no searching the streets for signs of her presence, no rereading messages. Withdrawal was brutal. Sleep came in fragments; dreams were filled with her voice and smile, waking hours dominated by the ache of absence. Slowly, though, he began to feel his body and mind return to fragile equilibrium. He could breathe without imagining her lips, think without seeing her eyes, walk without calculating her trajectory.

He did not block her out of hatred. He blocked her to reclaim himself, to survive. The act was terrible and necessary: an amputation of the spirit. Yet, paradoxically, in that space created by absence, he began to understand the depth of what he truly felt. Love was not possession. Love was willingness to endure, to survive, to carry the memory of another as a source of life rather than a chain.

Months later, he dreamed of her. She smiled—not as she once had, but distant and luminous, recognizing both continuity and change in him. He awoke, and for the first time in years, he felt the paradox of clarity: he loved her still, but was no longer dependent on her presence to exist. He had emerged from the machinery of obsession—not healed, not whole, but capable of feeling love without surrendering to it.

He remained haunted by her, as he always would be, but the haunting was no longer a prison. It was a quiet illumination, a reminder of the depth of feeling he was capable of, the cost of clarity, and the strange, terrible, beautiful truth: one can love wholly and survive.