How could just a number make one go mad, delusional, or specifically, obsessed? It wouldn't make any sense as it wasn't just a number, it was a number of things.
He had five, five foes that stalked him every day throughout his entire life, he stood still against them all and tried to control them at any cost, was it in vain? who were they or to be precise, what are they?
They say people are dispensable, some will come, others will go, but what about what they leave behind, pain? Hatred? Scars? Five?
Time. It's the essence of life, with it, we did the impossible throughout the ages, developed ourselves, enhanced our way of living, and yet he couldn't see it as a savior but a lethal weapon. He had this "friend" in which he considered his best company ever and they spent more like 5 years together, doing everything all together and yet he was left all alone, dumped by his best friend, over literally nothing, as if time was worthless in which ever since he realized that it was valueless. It couldn't keep what he had, heal him, and just kept on agonizing him.
Dreams. They are the last resort of satisfaction through fantasy, it's a large, deep world, with endless possibilities and overtime, he got obsessed with it, to live whatever he wanted in life in this extraordinary world, to meet whoever he pleases, to end whatever annoys him, being completely free and started getting hysterical about it, to change his real dark world with the imaginable bright world. There's no wonder why we close our eyes when we laugh, hug, or dream as the best in life cannot be seen but to be felt.
Oblivion. It's the most intimidating of them all, to be forgotten, to live in vain. He feared it as he knew people are naturally ungrateful no matter what you do, they deny everything good for only one bad thing and gradually, you just turn into a recall, a bad one and finally forgotten, left all alone drifting into the void.
Memories. They are that lucid picturing that touches the minds and souls, a large collection of previous desired and despised events, it can form in so many contradicted shapes as love, laughter, depression, death and it can be responsible for either a smile or a frown. He used it to live the good old days, trying to mimic his old being, happy. Either his wedding day or his mother's death, he could only see them as one thing, a memory, and how it could affect him significantly only to make him worse, either to remember or to regret the past.
Perfection. It's the impossible. It's what we all seek for. Going after it, is an absolute madness, to find something, someone, possessing no flaws, which literally doesn't exist. He was desperate in finding whomever he wanted as whenever he found one, he always found it missing some part, and then he searched for that missing part somewhere else to find what he strived besides another missing part. He started getting frantic and obsessed trying to find the complete and full version of what he was looking for but he lost his entire life searching nowhere for nothing. I wonder why when we seek perfection we neither look to the good nor the bright but the bad and the dark. We start admiring people only when they decease.
What the five had done to him was unjustifiable but he never asked himself why he became so like this, trying to control the uncontrollable, living in some fantasies, ignoring what's inevitable, denying good, and finally, searching for the impossible and out of existence. It's all obvious that they had something in common which was "people", it wasn't the five that made him like this, but the people that made him obsessed with the five. Or was it just him?
Don't let it control you, consume you, eventually destroy you, don't let it win.
