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.
For three hours.
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. a kind of madness dthrip
Yesterday, I rearranged the salt and pepper shakers on my kitchen table forty-three times. Not consecutively. Throughout the day. I would walk past, see that the pepper was on the left, and feel a small, exquisite violence in my chest. So I'd swap them. Then, ten minutes later, the salt would look wrong on the right. Swap again. By the sixth swap, I wasn't sure which arrangement I actually wanted. By the twelfth, I realized: there is no correct arrangement. The Hum knows this. It is not trying to help me find order. It is trying to exhaust me into a scream. That is the kind of madness I mean:
The problem is that the Hum is quiet now. And I know—I know —that means it's saving up. Tomorrow, it might decide that the shadows on the wall are wrong. That the light switch needs to be flipped exactly seventeen times before bed. That the word enough has one too many letters. For three hours