Sarah Mills
OCD IN THREE PARTS
My therapist says I need to get comfortable with uncertainty,
that life is unpredictable and all we can do is surrender.
I glance at my to-do list to see if I’ve written that down—
surrender—but it’s not there. I like to keep lists of things:
ideas for poems, recipes, places my future self will visit.
My therapist reminds me that no matter how many times
I check the stove or all three weather apps on my phone,
it will never feel like enough. And she’s right. There’s always
a faint alarm sounding in the dark and lovely woods of my brain.
Flooding is the number one weather-related cause of death.
As a child, I stockpiled canned goods and all my favorite toys
in the basement of my home to prepare for an impending storm.
I still have trouble sleeping when I think about how the rain
from Ida trapped all those people in their basement apartments.
I wonder—over and over—how much time they had before
water filled their lungs and they knew they had to surrender.
How much time before they stopped trying to stay afloat.
Water is fickle—there is always either too much or never enough.
In my 30s, I attended my first support group. The facilitator
asked trivia questions and pressed buttons on a sound effects machine:
clapping, laughter, that whomp-whomp noise.
Someone brought cookies and apple cider as if for a celebration.
I kept my coat on during the first hour of the meeting,
but took it off when the man beside me said his intrusive thoughts
kept pounding on his locked door at 3 in the morning. He talked about
how he’d glide his hand along the wall looking for a light switch,
how he’d find it and turn it on, then off, then on again.