Note: I’m exploring dark fiction, so please don’t set me up for an intervention or psychiatric help.

***

Two… four… six…

I remember how it all started. It was the day I decided my hands weren’t clean enough. It went on for a while until my parents started doubting my long hours in the bathroom. It was bad, them finding me scalding my hands in the sink. Sometimes, they had to open the door for me because I’d be too afraid to touch the doorknob. I’ve lived with OCD for twenty more years after that, and I can’t say how many times I felt like giving up.

It’s funny how everybody uses that term so freely. All because they can’t stand seeing a stain on the table. They take pride in their self-diagnoses, even. Wouldn’t they want to spend a day in my head. It’s not just the desire to be neat. It’s the need to have things just right. Losing sleep worrying if the taps are turned off. The need to open and close the door eight times before I can walk out of a room. The impulsive—

I-M-P-U-S—no.

I-M-P-S—no no no.

I-M-P-U-L-S-I-V-E

The impulsive thoughts of hurting someone. I can’t spend two minutes around people without vivid images of violence crowding my mind. I’ve found it sinful just to be around people now. I’m worried that I’d one day make those thoughts come true. OCD is not being able to work, wondering if you put the book in the exact position on the shelf back home. It’s not just about hating a smudge on your mirror, or sorting your Froot Loops by colour and posting it on Facebook. I find it hard to even articulate how it is to suffer from this disease. If only people knew what they were downplaying every time they claimed to have this disease. I’m sure that the ADD sufferers are being misrepresented in the same light as well.

Twenty-eight… thirty… thirty-two…

But it got better for a while. Depressants work wonders when it comes to silencing the mind. I wonder what I’d have done without benzos. That stuff helped me forget my obsessions. Not all of them, mind, but at least it got me functioning again. That was until today. The doctor mumbled something about my liver and cirrhosis. To me, it just sounded like going back to crazy, or medicating myself to death. Not much of a choice, really.

Sixty-six… sixty-eight… seventy…

It’s exhilarating, knowing that these little things are what’s going to set me free. Got to get them just right, though. It wouldn’t do to have too much, or too little. It has to be perfect.

Eighty-four… eighty-six… eighty-eight.

There. Eighty-eight bars of Xanax. Now all that’s left is my bottle of whiskey—

A-L-O—no.

A-L-C-C—fuck!

A-A-L—

A-L-C-O-H-O-L

All I need is just this bottle of whiskey to wash it all down, and I can be free. Goodbye world.

Wait. Did I leave the tap on? Sigh. Open, close. Open, close. Open, close. Open, close.