Words by Tye Iverson PZ ’26, Artwork by Maya Rafael PZ ’27

A habit is a placeholder. An item which binds you to the activities shining in your right arm, held together through your wrist and down to your forefingers. It waves hello to the goodbye you’ll see on the other side of a day.

My Obsessions are a lock. A foot to a can keeps that shit close. You can pinpoint it like a drunk to his liquid. I drank two of ‘em yesterday before I ran away too far for my liking; that adrenaline, that pulse in my veins—that is exactly what I’m talking about. It’s momentum; a thud, a sound in my head that makes me do everything I never think of. And it’s always on my damn mind.

A habit is fun. Sometimes they rest in an annoying place in your brain, but often I hold those habits near to me. They run around sweet fields of tall grass, they tickle my face with pointy tips on dewey stingers.

My Obsessions are a boom of fuck you and all that. I can feel my twitches start in a checkered track—they’re brightened by something that I hope is my own slipped up guts. 

“It’s a shame dear…” For showering takes too long now, and the sap from my dripping wax is falling far from my ear.

My Obsessions keep me confused. They push my feet to an edge, molted on reek concaving. Often I don’t understand the shit I spew, but I have no idea who I am without it.

Habits help me say “I love you.” My mom kisses my cheek with a toning gloss of forever embrace. I know her so well.

My Obsessions nail me to the board. They lock me in a bathroom I ain’t never gonna leave. Not until I touch that door handle. I’ll touch it a few more times, and then when I don’t want to no more, I do it again. And when I decide it’s time to pack my bags, the boom from an emphasized gong will press me against a wall of brick. A sheet of hardened dirt, pressed to a dull place of numb surprises. And that moss in the cracks count all the critters, but we step on them too.

My Obsessions play keen to the spotlight. When I can’t leave a single inch, like the one next to me now, you’ll see; trust me, like a Catholic to a nun. They gaze upon my face with a confused look that I have too. Sometimes I see them and they start melting. Their skin is achy with an itch I provided. 

My Obsessions are the keys on my hand board. You ever sit in wet cement? Let that shit burn you all up. The Obsessions I play with keep me glued with hot tar. To be frank, I drink that black liquid—the one which slides down your throat—all damn day. That stuff holds me to it. 

My Obsessions, most of all, are the scariest shit you’re gonna know. When I tell you I have to, I do; please God believe me. When I tell people I’m infected with a fat zit branded on the boot of my soul they don’t believe me. When I tell people I sit on the floor of an ice cold locker room for three hours cause I can’t open the damn door right, they don’t believe me.

Would you? If I said I had to do it, would you still believe me? You want to. But I know you won’t. My talker doesn’t really listen either. She’s a doctor and mom pays her a fuck ton for me to be ‘listened to.’ 

No one seems to understand how it is. I’m obsessed with everything around me. I’m enthralled, captivated, attached, glued. Give me a pen and I won’t write nothin’ until you want me to. But if I find those aching things zooming around those corners, if I let the tar emerge, if I press those keys just hard enough—well, I’ll never stop writing. That actually happened once, truth to that. 

Tomorrow, or maybe the next day, when I come up in your clouds of thought again, you’ll see me just as I appear to anyone. But if you took a Bic to my thick ol’ skin, the blood of an obsessed child would ooze with an excess of who knows. And no matter how much gauze you’ve got, or how many stitches you make, my wounds will keep opening to a thought that ain’t no habit. Cause the scar that won’t close ain’t no scar at all. It’s a dull, bright pink, dried-and-bloody happening of something some people say they got.