Trapped Inside Your Obsession
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
You can feel it before you can prove it.
That prickle at the base of your neck.
The sense that the air behind you
is holding its breath.
You turn your head—
nothing.
But something has already learned
the weight of your footsteps.
Obsession doesn’t announce itself.
It memorizes.
It learns the time you leave.
The way your mouth tightens when you’re tired.
Which light you switch on first.
Which silence belongs to grief
and which belongs to relief.
You didn’t offer this information.
It was taken.
There is something violating
about being known without consent.
About realizing your life
has become a pattern
someone else feels entitled to trace.
You start editing yourself.
Your routes.
Your joy.
Your presence.
You stop lingering.
Stop glowing.
Stop existing loudly.
Because being watched
does something to the body.
It makes your skin feel wrong—
like it no longer seals you in.
Like eyes have fingerprints.
You feel dirty
in a way soap cannot reach.
Not because you are unclean—
but because someone keeps touching you
with their attention
and refuses to lift their hands.
There is fear, yes—
but deeper than fear
is restraint.
The way obsession tightens around you
without ever closing its fist.
The way it says
you are not allowed to move on
until I say so.
You begin to feel displayed.
Like a butterfly
caught mid-flight,
wings stretched wide
not for admiration
but examination.
Pinned.
Not to kill you—
but to keep you still.
To slice and catalogue
the parts of you
they don’t understand.
To own the version of you
that lives in their head
even as the real you
tries to escape.
They call it care.
They call it connection.
They call it unfinished love.
But love does not stalk.
Love does not track.
Love does not refuse to release
what it cannot possess.
This is control
wearing a human face.
This is someone mistaking memory
for permission.
Desire
for destiny.
And slowly—
quietly—
you start wanting to disappear.
Not because you are weak.
But because being perpetually observed
without safety
without choice
without end
feels like being hunted
by someone who knows your name
and will not stop saying it.
You are not here
to be pinned.
To be watched into silence.
To have your wings reduced
to evidence
for someone else’s fixation.
If you feel this
in your chest right now—
that tightening,
that urge to look over your shoulder—
know this:
You are not imagining it.
And you were never meant
to live your life
inside someone else’s grip.
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Poetry Anthologies by Britt Wolfe:
