Is obsession a sickness, or the most sincere form of love? It’s a difficult question, since love has always been sold to us as the ultimate sacrifice.

I always believed that.

And that’s why I was capable of anything.

For love.

Obsession is the most sincere form of love, because you’re capable of giving everything without question.

The knife went in slowly. Not because I pushed it, but because he didn’t resist. Or maybe he did — maybe his hands searched for mine in that last second, but I no longer remember clearly where his effort ended and where my disappointment began.

What I do remember is the sound.

It wasn’t like in the movies. There were none of those exaggerated screams or violent drama. It was something clean and perfect; he held his mask until the very end.

That made me smile.

I kept the knife still for just a moment, closing my eyes, feeling his heart beat against the blade — once, twice, three times.

I looked at him.

He looked at me.

His eyes — that gray-green that shifted with the light, greener in the mornings and grayer at night — began to lose their color.

I noticed. I’m good at noticing things like that.

"There," I whispered, because someone had to say it. "You’re becoming what you promised me."

With my free hand I fixed his beautiful blonde fringe. The same gesture he used to make with mine. I think he taught it to me without meaning to. Especially when he did it with others.

"Without meaning to, I painted myself more in your colors," I said, twisting the knife. "That makes me more yours." I curled into his chest, into a patch of his apron that wasn’t so splattered. "But now, you are only mine."

I stayed still until his chest stopped moving, his hands stopped resisting, and his eyes stopped trying. I didn’t do it out of fear, or doubt. It’s simpler than that.

"The things that matter deserve that care," I repeated for the last time — his phrase, my inheritance. "They deserve someone who stays until the end."

I withdrew the knife with the same gentleness with which he used to take care of me. I wiped it on the fabric of the green apron; I had chosen it for the color of his eyes — that color which now existed nowhere in the world except on my clothes.

I looked at him one last time. His new eyes, his new skin tone.

"Now you’re white," I laughed, as I fell to my knees. "Now you understand what I suffered."

But the shop bell gave its final alert — its classic and magical clink clink, announcing an arrival.

"What have you done, Ryne!"

That was a week ago.

Ryne Moore: Yandere as a Philosophy of Love