o.c.d
You hover your hands beneath the stream. Not touching, not committing. Just hovering, as if the space between water and skin were a membrane rupturing on contact, or a faucet throat-clearing itself awake, one sputtering cough, then a narrow ribbon of water. At dawn, the bathroom tiles glow the color of diluted milk.
You remember being small enough to fit under the sink entirely, knees tucked, pipes ticking overhead like trapped insects. Back then, you believed water cured things, so you dipped your palms beneath the flow and imagined your fingerprints rinsing down the drain, replaced by new ones: smooth, stainless, unknowing.
Now, the water is not a cure but a negotiation. You study the pearlescent spuds slipping off your wrist bones and wonder whether something as stubborn as fear can be washed to a thin sheen, like a stain diluted to memory.
When you realize the world clung, it’s winter. Your chapped knuckles split open and sting in the cold; air knits at the tip of your nose. You watch the wound bead, then bloom, then crust into a thin copper scab. You peel it too early, curiosity winning, and see how easily the body could be interrupted. A small rift, that the whole system rushes to defend.
Later, soap becomes a ritual: lemon-scented, sterile-bright, a kind of artificial sun. It foams obediently, lifting from your skin in perfect white coils, promising to lift whatever unseen thing worries you too– thoughts of warbled green flagellated goop. You listen to the water run and imagine particles fleeing, tiny trespassers dissolving into harmless static. Chemical sunshine.
Your mind likes the idea of trim borders. Of skin as a shoreline. Of the world pressing against you in waves but never breaching.
But the world is persistent. It lingers on doorknobs, on railings, in seams of jeans and the grooves of fingerprints. Sometimes you feel it–microscopic tides crawling the length of your wrists, searching for entry
Sometimes it arrives without touch at all: an imagined film across the knuckles, a grainy residue collecting in the half-moons of your nails. You picture colonies and the air moves heavy–slow–drift settling into the narrow folds along your hands. You watch the specks collect in the shallow lines of your skin, accumulations that rearrange themselves with each pulse. You map the movement beneath the surface.
You scrub until your pulse sped up from the heat, until your palms blush pink, flushing confessions.
There are moments like that: quiet, sterile, where the smallest sensation, a tickle on the forearm, a phantom itch, grows sharp teeth.
And yet.
There are mornings when the water runs warm instead of hot. Evenings when breezes graze your arm and you don’t flinch. Nights when the last suds break away, drifting off the shore. And some days the wind brushes past you, and your brain doesn’t turn your body into a shield.
