Life was throwing its hardest rocks, one after another. I’d come home from failing to finish my master’s degree, from losing the business and the flat that felt like a promise, a beginning of something new. I told myself two months: hide, breathe, restrategize. Anywhere with a roof. Two months became three, then six, then a year, then two. Misery settled into the seams of my days. This was not the life I’d chosen. How could I be stuck here?

Once, I thought of ending it. The thought arrived like a cold calculation: stop the pain now. I wanted to vanish. But the small things held me, ridiculous things, the kind that don’t sound heroic on paper. My pet snails, for instance: absurd, fragile, inexplicably precious. I imagined releasing them so they could live if I didn’t. I walked out to the compound to let them go and found myself pulled into a heated conversation with a neighbour in the next compound, a talk I hadn’t wanted to join but couldn’t leave without offence. I didn't want to be rude. When it ended, something in me had unspooled. The urge to die had been replaced by a stubborn curiosity about living. I would try step by step. I wasn’t as sharp as I’d been, maybe, but I could feel a path under my feet.

It was a bright day that blurred into another ordinary trouble. The power company came to cut the light because someone, Mallam Maaji, had bypassed his meter. My neighbour 'Brass' and I tried to fix it with the power company. We failed. Another neighbour, Tom, offered to join us on our next visit to the Power House.  He made this offer through the compound's group chat. He said he’d drive down to the office when we arrived there. That was the first time I heard his voice properly. Soft. Calm. Deep in a way that settled into my chest. He is tall! I noticed that too, absurdly, as if height could explain anything. The voice did something to me. I had a crush.

I told my kid sister, my best friend, who was visiting at the time. We laughed the kind of loud, affectionate laugh that kept us human in a small, messy world. When a neighbour comes looking for me, I would ask her loudly "Which one is it?" The one I like? She would reply loudly too, "No.' she teased me,  “Is it the one you like?”  It felt like a ritual for a week. The crush was a warm, secret thing.

I delivered a grilled fish order the afternoon his 'brother' drove into the compound in a new car. I asked the driver if he sold cars; he said to talk to his brother... My crush. Later, when he returned from work, I was sitting outside with Brass. I asked him about cars. He said yes, that it was part of his deal, and then, casual as a breeze, he asked if I wanted to smoke weed. I agreed. Excited.

Another night, a late, golden evening after a date, I was outside my room inside the compound smoking weed when I impulsively messaged him about cars again after I saw another new vehicle. He replied. I asked if he was alone; he said yes, he was and studying for his master’s exam. I went in. It felt like home. We smoked, we studied, we played music together. When it was time to leave, he touched my arm at the door, slowly, deliberately, and I felt every inch of it. I told him I liked it; he kissed me. Soft, sweet, deep, powerful. I walked home smiling, the night wrapped in the same gravity as a dream.

We met again after a few days. And again. The next two nights blurred into each other: smoke, music, play, then sex! the kind that rearranged the map of me. It became the center. The sex was the best I’d ever had: precise, playful, instinctive. He knew how to shift the air between us so that everything else fell away. He taught me chess and whispered songs that lodged in my head; he showed me new ways to laugh and made me very happy. He became my bad habit and my clearest refuge.

I knew I wasn’t in love. Love felt like a long, patient architecture; this was a storm: thrilling, dangerous, immediate. Still,  I could not get him out of my head. His kindness, his small romantic gestures, the way he found the exact spot at exactly the right time, those things made me want to worship him. I wanted to cook for him, to make good meals that pleased him, to be useful in the way that made him happy too. I feared how easily I would say yes to him. Sometimes, in the soft aftermath of sex, I shivered at the thought of what he might ask next and of how powerless I would be to refuse.

It was déjà vu, one of the strongest I’d ever felt. As though I had done this before, lived it already, and was only retracing steps carved into my soul. I didn’t know what to do with the feeling, only that I wanted to dive into it completely. He was my fairy tale, my fantasy, my bad habit, my obsession. The night I gave him a romantic massage, his skin pressed against my palms, firm yet soft, impossibly clean, impossibly real. When we went out and he walked to use the men's, I watched every movement, his stride laced with a kind of effortless swagger that made his slender frame seem like a model’s. The way he spoke to his friends, calm yet commanding, like a king presiding over his court, made me ache with desire to have him. I wanted the “one” whom I will be spending the rest of my Life with in the future to have these same qualities. He was never the same person twice, different faces, different moods, all of them pulling me deeper. I never stayed long enough to see the side of him I might not like. Maybe there was one. Maybe he was a manipulator. But I didn’t care. Not then.

Obsession is a quiet thief. It moves in unannounced. You tell yourself you control it; you will set the boundaries, you will step away. I took a break because I didn’t truly know who he was, and because obsession was starting to look like a shape that could turn into something else. A dangerous something.

Even now, when the world throws another rock and my plans crumble, his songs still play in my head. The chess pieces sit in the corner of my mind, waiting for a perfect time to use them. Oh my dear Obsession, he had a magnetic pull to him I couldn’t negotiate with logic. Obsession does not announce itself. It simply rearranges your life until the new shape looks inevitable.

And if I must choose, I want to try being dangerous on my own terms.