The rug has no wrinkles. I checked. Twice.
That is the kind of madness I mean: the kind that looks like diligence. The kind that wears a collared shirt and pays its bills on time and never misses a dental appointment. The kind that smiles at the pharmacist and says, "Just the usual," while inside, a tiny, furious god is rearranging the vowels in the word refrigerator to see if it spells anything ominous. a kind of madness dthrip
By Dthrip The first time I noticed it, I was buttering toast. The butter was too cold. The knife caught a crumb. The crumb fell onto the linoleum. I stared at that crumb for seventeen seconds. Not because I was counting. But because something behind my eyes had begun to count everything. The rug has no wrinkles
They call it a kind of madness, the need to correct the uncorrectable. My doctor—a man with the emotional range of a parking meter—called it "subclinical obsessive-compulsive patterning." I call it the Hum. Because it isn't thoughts. It's a frequency. A low, patient thrum that says: that chair is two millimeters out of alignment with the window frame. Fix it. No, not with your hands. With your mind. Fail, and we will hum louder. That is the kind of madness I mean:
So here I am, writing this on the back of a grocery receipt, because the Hum doesn't like the sound of keyboard clicks— too many variables, too many possible patterns . I am not asking for help. Help would require explaining that the problem isn't the shakers, or the rug, or the crumb from this morning (which I finally swept up, then put back, then swept again, just to feel the relief of a decision, even a wrong one).
The madness is that I will spend the next hour trying to figure out which one to remove.