The rituals were just the beginning. Beneath them, a constant hum of anxiety—a live wire in my chest, sparking at the slightest touch. Triggers everywhere. A misplaced word, a sudden noise, a change in plans, and I'd spiral, heart hammering, thoughts racing, trapped in a loop of what if, what if, what if.
"Memory is a scratched CD—
it skips where the damage is deepest."
Dawn lives forever in 1976—perpetually sixteen in my memory, her ponytail bouncing as she walks just ahead of me in the hallway. I could chart my teenage years in centimeters of proximity: three lockers down, two rows back in English, always near enough to torture myself with possibilities.
My obsession had its own rituals. Timing my route to chemistry to intersect hers. Memorizing her class schedule before my own. Writing letters I'd immediately shred because the words never matched the feeling. For two years, I built a cathedral of longing in my mind, lighting candles to a saint who never knew my name.
The cruelest joke? She was kind. Not the unattainable queen of teen movies, but a human who once lent me a pencil when mine snapped during a test. "Here," she'd said, smiling, and I froze like a rabbit in hawk shadow. That pencil became a relic—I carried the stub in my pocket until graduation, wood worn smooth from nervous fingering.
Now, three decades later, the regret isn't about romance. It's about the sheer waste of all that silent yearning. How I could recite the pattern of freckles on her shoulders but couldn't muster a single "Nice weather we're having." OCD made her another ritual—not a person to know, but an incantation to repeat, a rosary bead of what-ifs to clutch in the dark.
Google tells me she's a realtor in Phoenix now. Sometimes, when the insomnia wins, I stare at her professional headshot—the same smile, crow's feet replacing laugh lines—and wonder if she ever noticed the quiet boy who loved her so violently in silence. Probably not. And that's the real heartbreak: my greatest teenage passion was a monologue performed to an empty house.
"They say time heals all wounds.
They never met OCD."
Randi Chapman's betrayal lives in slow motion—6th grade spring, the chain-link fence digging into my palms as I watched her press her braces against Brian Smith's mouth behind the school. That metallic taste? Probably blood from biting my own tongue too hard. I walked home counting cracks in the sidewalk (37 from school to my porch), each one a tally mark against love itself.
Susan at twenty-two deserved better. From life, from me. Our bed smelled like her vanilla shampoo and Marlboro Lights. She'd laugh when I alphabetized her bookshelf, then kiss the OCD right out of me. When she left, it wasn't even anger—just a note and a half-empty bottle of Zoloft. Her obituary three years later used the word "unexpected" like it could soften suicide's gut-punch. I still can't smell vanilla without checking exits.
Mom's diabetes was a quieter unraveling. At her funeral, the church ladies whispered "so young" while fingering their pearls. Sixty-three is only young on paper. In reality, it was thirty years of insulin shots and watching her cut birthday cake she couldn't eat. The real tragedy wasn't her death, but the decade of grieving we did while she was still alive.
Each loss became a trigger wrapped in a Russian doll: Randi's braces led to Susan's note led to Mom's empty chair. Heartbreak doesn't fade—it compounds, each new grief borrowing pain from the last. I learned to love like a man building on fault lines: always waiting for the tremor.
"Diagnosis is both prison and pardon—
the bars are real, but at least you know
you didn't imagine them."
It found me through static—that old CRT television in my studio apartment, its glow the only light as midnight approached. Some PBS documentary about mental illness, the kind that usually made me change channels to avoid seeing my reflection. But that night in '95, the screen held up a mirror: a man counting cracks in the sidewalk, his lips moving silently as his fingers twitched at his sides. The narrator said "obsessive-compulsive disorder" just as my own fingers were tracing the pattern on my knee for the eighth time that hour.
The recognition hit like a stolen breath. Here was my demon given a name—not just personal quirk, but something with clinical weight. I sat frozen as they showed a woman washing her hands until they bled, her eyes hollow with the same exhausted determination I saw in my bathroom mirror. For the first time, I understood: the rituals weren't choices. They were symptoms.
That night, I wore out the apartment's carpet pacing. The knowledge should have been freeing, but terror coiled tight around my ribs—if this was a real condition, then I was truly sick. Not eccentric. Not particular. Sick. I counted the VHS tapes by the TV (alphabetical by title, chronological by purchase date) and hated how right it felt when the documentary mentioned "systems of control."
By dawn, I'd called in sick to work and was at the public library, microfiche articles spread like evidence at a trial. Every description matched: the intrusive thoughts I'd assumed were just my dark imagination, the checking behaviors I'd passed off as thoroughness. The relief of diagnosis warred with the grief of realizing how much life the demon had already consumed—all those years thinking I was uniquely broken, when really I'd just been undiagnosed.
Mrs. Gonzalez's Spanish class suddenly made terrible sense. The abandoned jobs. The failed relationships. The monster had a name now, but naming it didn't make it tame. If anything, the awareness sharpened its edges—I could now trace exactly how its claws hooked into every part of my life.
"Perfection is the cruelest master—
it demands everything
and forgives nothing."
The house closing should have been a triumph. Instead, I stood in the empty living room noticing every flaw—the baseboard with a hairline crack, the bathroom tile slightly off-grout, the front door that didn't sigh shut quite right. What should have been my castle became a catalog of imperfections. I lay awake calculating repair costs I couldn't afford, imagining guests' silent judgments. The anxiety grew teeth: This is what you'll be judged by now. I'd bought not a home, but a three-bedroom, two-bath failure.
Proposing brought no relief either. After years convincing myself I was destined to die alone—the safe, predictable outcome—the ring felt like strapping into a rollercoaster. Every day of the engagement was a new terror: Would I be enough? Could I pretend to be normal? What if she noticed the rituals I hid? I compiled mental lists of divorced acquaintances like grim fortune-telling, certain I'd join their ranks.
But nothing compared to the Tonsil Summer of 1999. At twenty, I became obsessed with swallowing symmetry. Each uneven gulp felt like a personal failure—a physiological betrayal. I'd drink until my stomach sloshed, chasing the mythical "perfect" swallow. Bed by 8:30 PM just to end the torture, only to wake at 2 AM with a dry throat and start the cycle anew. The surgery, when it finally came, was almost a relief—though of course I then fixated on whether the scars were even.
These weren't phases, but variations on the same theme: my mind's relentless pursuit of an impossible standard, then punishing me for failing to meet it. The house, the marriage, even my own throat—nothing could just be. Everything had to be measured, assessed, and inevitably found wanting.
"My mouth was a broken dam—
everything came flooding out
except what needed to be said."
My mouth was another kind of compulsion—an endless need to confess, to explain, to fill every silence with whatever thought had just crossed my mind. Filters were for other people. I'd blurt out inappropriate jokes at funerals, overshare with strangers in line at the pharmacy, dissect my relationships in real-time with anyone who'd listen.
In meetings, I was the one who couldn't let a bad idea die quietly. "Just one more thing—" as everyone was packing up. At parties, I'd corner some poor soul and monologue about my latest obsession until their eyes glazed over. Then I'd lie awake at night, replaying every awkward exchange, every moment I should have swallowed my words instead of setting them free.
The worst was Spanish class sophomore year. Mrs. Gonzalez—patient, kind-eyed—had called on me to translate. "¿Cómo se dice 'window' en español?" My mind blanked. The classroom air turned to syrup. She began mouthing "ven-ta-na" with exaggerated clarity, her hands shaping the word in the air between us. But I just stood there, paralyzed, as seconds stretched into eternity. Someone snorted. Then the whole class erupted—not cruel laughter, but the helpless kind that comes when awkwardness reaches critical mass. My face burned like a warning light. That moment still visits me at 3 AM sometimes—Mrs. Gonzalez's pleading eyes, the squeak of my sneakers shifting weight, how the word "ventana" became a life sentence.
The pattern repeated in workplaces like a cursed refrain. The tech startup where I analyzed the CEO's management style too accurately during my exit interview. The design firm where I lost interest mid-project and started rearranging the supply closet instead of meeting deadlines. The tech company where I made the entire engineering team uncomfortable by oversharing about my divorce during a sprint retrospective. Each pink slip carried the same unspoken verdict: Too much. Not enough. Wrong shape for the world.
"Numbers never comforted me—
they just made the panic
more precise."
The numbers still shock me when I add them up: $230,000 dissolved like sugar in rain. Child support checks that left my account before I could blink. Months of rent for apartments I'd pace in like a zoo animal, convinced the tech industry saw nothing but my graying temples when I submitted applications. Groceries bought on credit cards while waiting for investments to mature—the cryptocurrency that crashed, the "sure thing" startup that folded quietly in the night.
I became my own worst employment agency. "They want someone younger," I'd tell the mirror each morning, watching the lines around my eyes deepen. LinkedIn became a torture chamber—each "We've decided to move forward with another candidate" email proof of some unspoken conspiracy against middle-aged programmers. The anxiety built its own logic: if I didn't apply, I couldn't be rejected. If I couldn't be rejected, the story I told myself about ageism remained airtight.
The math never worked. Child support plus San Antonio rent plus medication plus the compulsive eBay purchases I'd justify as "investments"—it all subtracted faster than I could divide my dwindling savings. I'd lie awake calculating how many months remained until zero, then spend the next day applying to jobs I'd never follow up on, paralyzed by the certainty that my resume was already in the discard pile before it reached anyone's inbox.
"My apartment became a museum—
each exhibit proof of another self
I failed to become."
My apartment became a museum of abandoned hobbies. The $800 synthesizer I bought during a manic phase, convinced I'd become the next Brian Eno, now collects dust beside yoga mats still wrapped in plastic. The French press meant to replace my caffeine addiction sits unwashed, its filter clogged with months-old grounds. Every object tells the same story—intense passion followed by abrupt abandonment.
The refrigerator hums its familiar song at 3:17 AM. I know this because I've timed it. There's comfort in its irregular rhythm—the way it stutters to life like an old car on a cold morning. Sometimes I press my palm against its side, feeling the vibration travel up my arm. Still working. Still here. It's become my most consistent relationship.
I've developed rituals around the mundane. Tuesday nights are for reheating the HEB rotisserie chicken until it's dry as sawdust. Thursdays I alphabetize the spice rack (never using any). Sunday mornings I walk to the 7-Eleven just to hear the clerk say "Same as usual?" even though my purchases have no pattern. These small ceremonies keep the chaos at bay, like sandbags against a flood.
"The internet never forgets—
it just waits patiently
to remind you at 3 AM."
YouTube knows me better than my therapist. Its recommendations form a perfect map of my neuroses: videos about repairing vintage radios (I own none), tutorials on calligraphy (my handwriting is illegible), documentaries about failed tech startups. I fall asleep to the murmur of strangers explaining things I'll never need to know, their voices smoothing the jagged edges of my thoughts.
The internet remembers what I try to forget. Facebook shows me memories of jobs I quit abruptly, relationships I sabotaged, parties I left without explanation. Each notification is a tiny resurrection of shame. I've learned to check them at 11:47 PM—late enough that I can't message anyone about what I see, early enough that the insomnia hasn't set in completely.
My search history reads like a psychiatric textbook: "Is it normal to count sidewalk cracks?" "Age discrimination in tech over 50" "How to apologize for oversharing at work". The autocomplete knows my fears before I finish typing them. Sometimes I wonder if Google's algorithms understand my mind better than I do—if somewhere in Mountain View, there's a server farm assembling my personality from digital breadcrumbs.
"I built my life in the margins—
where the fall couldn't break me
because I'd never climbed."
Thirteen years in the same apartment. Ten years in jobs that required nothing more than my shadow. I built my life inside these margins—the same yellowed linoleum underfoot each morning, the same route to workplaces that expected only my absence of ambition. There was safety in knowing exactly how far I could fall.
The apartment became my exoskeleton. I memorized every crack in the bathroom tiles (nineteen, with one shaped like Florida). The front door stuck in humidity but I never complained—better a door that resisted opening. Maintenance requests went unmade; even change felt dangerous. When the property manager offered to upgrade my unit, I laughed so hard it came out as a cough. "I'm fine right here," I said, patting the wall like a nervous horse.
Work was the same calculus of diminished expectations. I took the tech support job precisely because it promised no promotions. My coworkers' ambitions circled like planes in holding patterns—management tracks, certifications, networking events—while I sat perfectly still at my cubicle. They mistook my inertia for contentment. The truth was more pathetic: I'd rather be underestimated than risk failing at something that mattered.
Routines calcified. Tuesday: frozen pizza burned black at the edges. Thursday: laundry washed at 10 PM when the machines stood empty. Sunday: checking my bank balance exactly three times despite knowing the number wouldn't change. I told myself this was wisdom—learning to want what I already had—but the lie grew thin in daylight.
My daughters asked about career changes. "You're so smart," they'd say, and I'd deflect with jokes about old dogs. The truth sat like a stone in my throat: I stayed because staying was the only move I couldn't fuck up. Better to be the guy who never tried than the one who tried visibly and failed.
"Certainty was my addiction—
I'd trade years of my life
for one moment of perfect surety."
The wallet check begins reasonably—a pat to the back pocket, a satisfying rectangle of leather against fingertips. But then the algorithm fails. Was that the right thickness? Maybe the cards shifted. I excuse myself to the restaurant bathroom, where under fluorescent lights, I perform the sacred rite:
1. Remove wallet
2. Count cards (always fourteen)
3. Verify driver's license orientation
4. Check $20 bill in hidden compartment
5. Repeat until the universe clicks into place
Returning to the table is its own torture. My friend's pasta has gone cold. "Everything okay?" they ask, and I smile while mentally replaying Step 3. The Caesar salad turns to ash in my mouth. Maybe I missed something. The urge to check again builds like a sneeze—irresistible, all-consuming.
Keys are worse. They must clink just so against my thigh when walking. I'll pause mid-stride to jingle them, unsatisfied, until strangers stare. Some nights I lay them out on the kitchen counter like surgical tools—house key, car key, mailbox key, each in their ordained position. The moment I lift them, the doubt creeps back in.
These aren't habits. They're full-body convulsions of uncertainty, physical manifestations of the static in my brain. The cruel joke? I know exactly where everything is. Always. The checking was never about finding—it was about quieting the voice that whispers but what if this time is different?
"Leaving became its own prison—
each exit required
a perfect performance."
Leaving the house becomes a sacred torture. The front door lock must click exactly three times—not two, not four—each metallic snick a temporary salve for the anxiety. I'm already late when the coffee pot catches my eye. Did I unplug it? I know I did. I watched my own hand do it. But the doubt creeps in like fog under a door.
The checklist runs on a loop:
The car becomes a mobile prison. Five blocks away, panic sets in—did I check the back door? I can feel the imagined flames licking at the walls of my home. U-turn. Again. The neighbors probably think I'm dealing drugs or having an affair. The truth is more pathetic: I'm a hostage to my own brain's broken wiring.
Some days I miss appointments entirely, stuck in the checking purgatory between house and car. Other times I arrive sweating, having white-knuckled through the urge to turn back. The cruelest joke? In twenty-three years, I've never once left something on. Not the coffee pot, not the stove, not a single light. The monster I'm fighting exists only in my mind's crooked hallways.
"The internet became my confessional—
I searched for answers
and found only more questions."
Search bars became my confessionals. A slight twinge in my molar at 2 AM would send me spiraling into the cathedral of catastrophe that is WebMD. What began as "sensitive tooth" escalated to "jaw necrosis" within three clicks. I'd emerge hours later, convinced I had oral cancer—my tongue probing the offending tooth like a detective at a crime scene.
The rituals were precise:
Actual dentist visits were worse. The hygienist's innocent "Any concerns?" unleashed a torrent of self-diagnoses. I'd watch their face for tells—did that pause mean I was right about the abscess? When they said "Everything looks fine," I heard "We missed something." The X-rays became Rorschach tests—every shadow a potential tumor.
At its peak, I was brushing my teeth eleven times a day, gums receding from overzealous scrubbing. My tongue developed calluses from constant prodding. The irony? All that research led to actual cavities—from dehydration caused by avoiding acidic foods I'd convinced myself would trigger lesions.
OCD is the only illness that makes you both patient and unreliable narrator. The very mind searching for answers is the one distorting them. I didn't need a dentist—I needed an exorcist for my search history.
"Disaster stripped me bare—
in the wreckage, I found
the grace of being seen."
Hurricane Harvey didn't just flood my home—it drowned my carefully constructed illusions of control. For eight days I sat in the dark, watching brown water lick at the baseboards, each inch of rise erasing another layer of normalcy. The power outage was almost a mercy; I couldn't see the ruin advancing.
When the waters receded, they left behind a new kind of terror. Bedbugs—those humiliating hitchhikers—colonized the damp ruins. I became a man possessed, throwing out $3,000 worth of furniture in a single afternoon. The mattress where I'd slept for years hit the curb like a corpse. My skin crawled for weeks after, phantom itches waking me at 3 AM.
Then came the miracle: my sister Eileen appeared with rubber gloves and a shovel. No platitudes. Just work. Together we ripped up sodden drywall, our masks filling with sweat and mold spores. In the wreckage, something unexpected happened—I talked. Really talked. About the OCD, the loneliness, the fear that had calcified in me like arterial plaque.
She listened while scrubbing baseboards. Nodded while bagging ruined clothes. When I confessed I'd been eating cold beans straight from the can for days, she drove to HEB and returned with a hot meal, the first in a week. Not "You'll get through this," but "Eat while I bleach the bathroom."
Disaster stripped me bare, but in that vulnerability came an unexpected grace: being truly seen. The bugs were exterminated, the house rebuilt, but Eileen's quiet understanding remained—a lifeline I didn't know I needed until the waters rose.
"Love letters come in many forms—
some are written in ink,
others in the spaces between words."
Like you said on the phone: "Sometimes, to express yourself, it's—"
Let me start by explaining how I feel. It's a mixture of feelings—frustration, maybe hurt, several shades of bitterness, sadness, guilt, and a bit of confusion.
I feel angry at myself. Angry at the way our relationship progressed—or rather, didn't. Angry that we allowed things to get to the point where they were out of control.
You hurt me. Mostly unintentional, but nonetheless, it still hurt. From day one, I tried to reject your advances. I couldn't help feeling that we were not alike, not compatible.
So I'm trying to be what you want and resent you for it. I began to dislike myself trying to change. It wasn't working—sometimes what you wanted one time wasn't what you wanted other times. I just couldn't keep up.
I listed the times that you hurt me either by what you said or what you did. You would spin them because you would not remember or didn't think they bothered me. Maybe I'm overly sensitive. But one misconception you have about me is that I'm not sensitive, that maybe I'm hard or cold. In reality, if you felt I was sensitive maybe you would have treated me differently. But you didn't.
Now I'm not saying you're petty or horrible, or that you treated me badly. Because I would not be writing this if that were true. I also know that you loved me in your own way and wanted to make me happy. But your way of loving wasn't my way of needing.
You wanted quality time. I wanted scheduled time. You wanted me to just drop everything and come over at the spur of the moment. I wanted plans. When we went shopping, you'd say "Buy me something sweet." But you never did the same for me. You wanted spontaneous gestures but weren't spontaneous yourself.
I asked you to tell me you loved me once on the phone. You couldn't say it if you didn't feel it in that moment. You thought people threw those words around too freely. But sometimes I needed to hear them. Probably I was having a bad day or feeling insecure. Time went on and we spent less and less time together. The disagreements got worse.
The first time we felt like a couple was a rude awakening. Remember Buffalo? You wanted me to book a flight, then backed out. Virginia went alone. We were always fighting.
On my birthday, you took me to Portchester—a place you frequented with your ex. You reminisced about her while I sat there, invisible. That night, you left me stranded. I cried for hours.
You never waited for me—walking ahead, leaving restaurants before I'd even put on my coat. You complained about my job, not understanding the pressure. You called me at work, angry when I couldn't chat. Your free time was your priority; mine wasn't.
We weren't compatible then, and we never will be. You disagreed, but the evidence was everywhere. I couldn't open up to you; you couldn't understand me.
I still love you. But love isn't enough. I fear seeing you because I might fall back. I need space—to rediscover who I am alone.
If this is goodbye, I wish you happiness. I'll never forget you.
"Every invitation was a countdown—
not to the event,
but to my inevitable retreat."
Every invitation sets off a countdown clock in my chest. Dinner plans two weeks out become fourteen days of rehearsing exits. I'll lie awake scripting conversations that haven't happened, anticipating bathroom layouts I haven't seen, calculating exactly how many steps from front door to emergency exit. By the event's eve, I've lived it twenty times—each version ending in catastrophe.
The preparation rituals begin absurdly early. Three hours before a doctor's appointment: shower, deodorant, teeth brushed twice. Two hours: outfit tried and rejected six times. One hour: keys/wallet/phone check every ninety seconds. I arrive everywhere surgically clean and emotionally depleted, having already experienced the event in my mind a dozen terrible ways.
My calendar is a graveyard of crossed-out commitments. The polite declines stack up—"Something came up", "Not feeling well"—until friends stop asking. They think I'm flaky. The truth is worse: I care too much, not too little. A coffee date occupies more mental real estate than my actual apartment.
There's a special hell reserved for RSVPs. Clicking "Yes" feels like signing a blood oath. The days between commitment and event become a tunnel of what-ifs: What if I panic? What if I say something wrong? What if they notice I'm counting their ceiling tiles? The weight of anticipation makes cancellation inevitable—the relief of bailing so profound it's almost worth the shame.
My daughters have learned to spring plans on me last-minute. "Dad, we're outside right now" works where "Let's do lunch next Tuesday" guarantees radio silence. They think it's spontaneity I fear. They don't understand it's the knowing that wrecks me—all those empty hours between now and then, waiting to be filled with disaster.
"I stood at the edge of my life—
watching it happen
without me."
Relationships cracked under the weight of it. I'd withdraw, cancel plans, retreat into the safety of my apartment—because outside was too loud, too unpredictable. What if I panic? What if I can't hide it? Better to stay in, where the compulsions could breathe, where I could control the chaos.
And then, the shame. The gnawing fear of being judged—my body, my performance, my worth. Sex wasn't intimacy; it was a minefield of obsessions. Was I enough? Did they notice? The thoughts circled like vultures, picking apart every moment before it even happened.
Regret was a ghost that never left. Missed opportunities haunted me—jobs I didn't take, chances I didn't seize, all because the rituals and the fear held me back. And when new memories tried to form—holidays, birthdays, family moments—I let them slip past, numb. Just get through it. Don't feel it. Because feeling it meant risking another spiral, another collapse.
OCD isn't just counting. It's standing at the edge of your own life, watching it happen without you.
The rituals still whisper, but quieter now. I've built a life between their cracks—twenty-three years in tech, two daughters who somehow inherited my smile but not my broken wiring. They're brilliant. They deserved more than a father who sometimes loved his compulsions more than the present moment. I try to forgive myself for that.
Aging is an unexpected relief. The sharp edges of my younger anxieties have dulled into something almost like wisdom, or maybe just exhaustion. I live alone, in a silence that would've terrified the old me. Weeks pass without my voice leaving my throat. My fridge hums. My clocks tick. The silence isn't peaceful, but it's honest.
HEB is my social calendar now. I linger in the cereal aisle just to hear people laugh. The checkout girls—young enough to be my granddaughters—probably see a sad old man making awkward small talk about the weather or the price of avocados. I don't correct them. Let them think whatever they need to. We all survive this world with our little fictions.
The OCD still lives here, but we've reached an understanding. I don't fight it as hard. It doesn't choke me as much. Some days, that's the closest thing to peace I get.
My daughters call sometimes. They say "I love you" like it's a fact, not a question. I'm learning to believe them.
The music never stopped.
It just learned to play around the scratches.