7

When is it clean? When is the mountainous pile of past a neat and orderly present?

When I started to ask myself these questions, I knew I was getting back to the old ways, the micromanaging ways that ended with a disorder that made me pull out chunks of my hair. Trichotillomania, they called it. Trich. Trick. Damn, but wasn’t it tricky.

When I asked myself these questions, I knew I was getting too philosophical, too sneaky and clever and like the way I used to be, when I read Plato and Aristotle and then made sure everyone knew it because it wasn’t just enough to be worldly. Everyone had to know I was worldly.



When I was that way, let’s face it. I was miserable.

When is a life tidy? Is it when you’re the only thing left, in the last moments before you leave life and have no more earthly ties? I think maybe if I had no friends to worry about and no friends to worry about and no job no money no career no boyfriend no house to care about, maybe then everything would refrain from ever getting messy.

When will I learn to be less of a pessimist and focus on the happy things? I can only focus on the tidiness or lack thereof that is choking me, I swear it’s choking. My roommate thinks I’m exaggerating, and it makes her crazy when I try to clean the shower for the second time in a week. But the truth is that I don’t deal well with the messy side of life.

When will I be able to deal with the messy things, for that matter? Will I ever be able to look at a full sink, think about my tired feet and my too-late nights and my alarm clock, waiting to shrilly wake me in five point six hours and think, “Aw, screw that. I’ll clean it up tomorrow.” I think this is commonly called OCD. How come every time you see OCD on television, it’s all glamorized, so that it helps a famous detective, or makes a doctor save lives because he hates something being out of place in the human body. For me, it’s just a pain in the ass.

When will I bother to go see a psychiatrist about my goddamned OCD. I would need a bigger paycheck for that, though. But maybe my health insurance covers it. Not that I’m going to have my health insurance much longer, the way the company is going. I wish I had fixed benefits. They lie to you and tell you they’re not fixed so they can be flexible, so they can improve for you, for the employee. That’s all lies. They’re going to take things away from me, I can tell.

When am I going to quit that damn job? They’re trying to get me to quit, anyway. That’s why they keep making me work extra hours, I know it. Or maybe I’m just being crazy.

When am I going to stop being so paranoid. I need things to be neat to stave off my paranoia. Germs and ick and dirt hide in mess, lurk to catch you when you’re not looking. An unpaid bill underneath a stack of old magazines. A smear of mold in a bowl of old fruit. You never know what could be waiting in the wings to kill you or to snatch your house and your commodities out from underneath you. It’s not paranoia, it’s practical. I’m being this way, this obsessive, neat way to save myself and everyone around me! I just need things to be clean enough.

When is it clean? When you don’t worry about it being clean anymore.