Page 132 of Obsession

“It always takes the food chain into account,” he looked me in the eye, and I flinched, still engrossed in his explanation.

“Snakes are part of everyone’s life, they are enemies. But you can choose to be the mouse or the hawk.”

I smiled as I realized this.

“The snake eats the mouse, but the hawk eats the snake.”

Harris smiled and nodded.

“I choose to be the hawk. You?”

I blinked and shook my head.

“I never thought about it until now. I think I could be a mouse with wings and a beak.”

Harris bit his lip to stifle his laughter. He grabbed my hand and pulled me closer to him.

“I could still eat you,” he whispered, and I shuddered.

I swallowed.

Our conversation had taken a completely different turn, and I stood up from him, shaking my head. His smile was paralyzing.

Before I could clear my head, I was surprised by another tattoo he had on the right side of his abdomen. A huge snake that slithered up to his ribs, started at his hip and ended near his armpit. The enemy.

I touched the reptile with my fingertips. Harris watched me calmly and intently. I knew all of this was connected, but I seemed to forget how. As soon as I looked into Harris’s black eyes, I remembered where I had seen all these things: in my dream.

The snake, the hawk … they were both part of my dream, and I almost whimpered when I realized it.

“What’s wrong?” Harris sat up next to me.

I shook my head, trying to calm myself down.

“So, snakes represent enemies,” I concluded.

Harris nodded.

“Then why do you have a tattoo of it?”

“An enemy is a constant threat. If you can’t escape it, you shouldn’t forget that it exists. On the other hand,” he paused and took a deep breath, “I was my own worst enemy for a long time. A merciless sycophant who preyed on the weak. It was not untilvery late that I dared to compare myself to a hawk, but I am still fighting to live up to my name.”

I swallowed and looked him in the eye. At first, I’d underestimated him, thinking he had so many tattoos to look dangerous.

Harris’s skin was a whole story.

Each tattoo had a meaning for the person who wore it. A feeling, a pain, a joy, a pleasure… something that represented its owner in one way or another.

And then there was my dream, just as I had seen them all before. The vulture or hawk was surely Harris, who saved me from the snake and from now on looked after me, as he had promised in my dream.

I shook my head and tried to clear my mind. Surely, I was dreaming too much for my mind.

He was still looking at me intently, and I tried to change the subject of “snakes and hawks”. I turned my attention to his other tattoos and noticed the Roman numerals on his arms again.

“My mom’s birthday,” He spoke before I could ask.

I took a closer look at the numbers, and after a quick calculation, his mother was about thirty-seven years old. Extremely young, and considering Harris was now nineteen, she gave birth to him at eighteen, even younger than my mother was when she had me.

Harris noticed my curiosity but didn’t say anything. We looked at each other for a while. Was it possible that we had been born under the same circumstances? As the mistakes of unconscious teenagers? Suddenly I had so many questions, but I closed my mouth to avoid asking them.

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