The Moonlight Dripping Red

"Some wounds do not bleed. They linger beneath the skin, glowing faintly in the mirror, asking: 'Was this your choice, or your undoing?'"

🩸🌹🩸

Obsession is not born loud. It doesn't arrive with drumbeats or declarations. It begins in silence.

A glance too long.

A voice that echoes when the world is quiet.

A thought that returns, uninvited, again and again, soft at first, almost innocent.

Psychologists define obsession as a persistent, unwanted thought that intrudes upon the mind, often provoking distress or compulsion. But that's the clinical truth. The stripped-down version. The language of textbooks and therapy rooms.

The deeper truth?

Obsession is a kind of haunting.

Not by ghosts, but by possibility.

It begins when reality is no longer enough, when someone's presence, or even their absence, begins to shape your choices. They occupy space not only in your daydreams but in the way your hand hovers over your phone. In the way your breath catches when you pass a place they might be. In the way you remember not what was done, but what was felt.

Obsession isn't the same as love.

Love is whole. Grounded. Willing to let go.

Obsession is hunger sharpened by denial. It is love stripped of reason. It's the thirst that remains after the glass has been shattered.

Theologians call it idolatry of the heart, a dangerous displacement, when desire for a person begins to eclipse desire for anything else. They warn of the soul becoming tethered not to truth, but to the illusion of fulfillment.

You begin to rewrite your own story just to keep them in it.

You remember what they didn't say.

You imagine what they might have meant.

You replay a touch that never came, a kiss that almost was, a gaze that left you unraveling.

Obsession grows not in abundance, but in absence. In the unanswered message. In the door that never opened. In the silence after they leave.

You start confusing pain with purpose.

You mistake the ache for connection.

You think, if I can just make them see me again, maybe I'll feel real again too.

But obsession doesn't give. It consumes.

It eats your focus. It laces itself through your speech. It becomes the axis around which your loneliness begins to orbit.

And by the time you realize it, you're no longer choosing. You're following. You're chasing. You starve for a single drop of the thing that once made your skin burn and your heart stutter.

And still, you come back. Again and again.

Not because you're weak.

But because obsession, once planted, doesn't just bloom.

It devours.

🩸🌹🩸🌕🌑🌔🩸🌹🩸

The stairs stretched like a punishment.

Each step pressed into Amalia's thighs as if gravity had doubled just for her. Her hand tightened around the railing, knuckles pale with effort. The world outside still hummed with life: horns echoing in distant streets, laughter spilling from balconies, music thudding faintly in some other apartment but none of it reached her. The sounds brushed past her like a language she no longer understood.

She unlocked her door with a hand that barely felt like hers.

The key scraped against the metal before it turned, and she slipped inside the quiet apartment like something broken slipping into shadow. The door closed behind her with a hush instead of a click, as if the walls themselves were afraid of startling her. The silence was immediate and bsolute. It pressed in on her ribs with the weight of something intimate and unwelcome.

She moved toward the bathroom, shedding her jacket with mechanical detachment. The light above the mirror flickered on, sharp and cold and the reflection staring back at her made her heart stutter.

It wasn't that she didn't recognize herself. It was that she did.

But the version of herself that blinked through the mirror was smeared and hollow. Her hair had fallen from its careful styling, strands sticking to her neck with dried sweat. Her eyeliner had smudged in the corners of her eyes, dark as bruises. Her lips, once painted in muted red, were now kissed open and stained with the memory of another mouth. And her neck was the worst of all.

There, just below her jaw, the puncture still bloomed like a wound from another century. It wasn't dramatic or dripping. It was too neat for that. But it screamed louder than any scar. A crimson smear along the slope of her throat that made her look like prey.

Amalia reached for the faucet and turned it until the water came icy. She didn't flinch at the cold. She splashed her face and scrubbed her skin, trying to erase the remnants of the night. But nothing lifted. The blood washed away in red-tinged trails down the porcelain, but the feeling stayed rooted beneath her skin, in her marrow, in the back of her tongue.

Her fingers trembled when she touched her throat. The bite wasn't deep, not enough to scar. But it had marked her in another way. A way the mirror could never fully show.

She stared at herself for what felt like hours.

She didn't speak or cry. She was just… existing. In the body that had been touched and taken. In the face that still felt like it belonged to someone else.

It wasn't the vampire who had kissed her that she saw behind her own eyes.

It was Liliana. It had always been Liliana.

Not the man's clumsy mouth. Not his eager hands. Not the sharpness of his teeth that had cut more than skin. No. The phantom that lingered in every breath, in every flush of shame or longing, wore blonde hair and blue eyes colder than winter.

Amalia tried to hate the vampire. She had told herself she would never return to that club...again. That she would never let herself be humiliated like that again. But promises made by pride often drowned beneath the weight of desire. And Amalia's pride now lay shattered, scattered like glass across the floor of her mind.

She turned off the light and walked to her bedroom in darkness.

Each step felt like walking through fog. Her limbs moved, but her spirit lagged behind. She removed her clothes slowly, as though peeling off memories rather than fabric. She folded them, not out of habit but because the silence begged for something gentle.

When she finally curled beneath her sheets, her body felt foreign.

Her legs trembled beneath the cotton. Her heart beat too fast for rest. She tucked her arms around herself, clutching the blanket like a lifeline.

The tears came eventually, not as an eruption, but as a tide. Slow, steady, betraying her only by the dampness on her cheeks.

She wanted to believe she could forget. That tomorrow she would wake up free.

But Liliana had already made a home in her thoughts. She had taken nothing and everything.

And Amalia, torn between hatred and hunger, curled tighter into herself with the ache of a girl who knew she had already lost.