Walt moved to close his sock drawer, bringing it flush with the others and restoring his meticlously organized room to harmony.
“No,” he whispered, gripping the knob. “No, dammit, no. I’m tired of this–tired of the cleaning, the handwashing, the rituals. If I can leave this drawer open all day, it’s the first step toward getting my OCD under control.”
Wrenching his trembling fingers off of the knob, Walk staggered downstairs and, by sheer force of will, finished getting ready. He had to stare at the front door for nearly ten minutes before getting it open, and the drive to the office would have been impossible if he didn’t have the route deeply engrained in his muscle memory.
Walt’s day was agony. The open sock drawer mocked him, taunted him, gnawing at the edge of his consciousness until everything else was hammered away. Beginning as a pebble in his shoe, the feeling soon metamorphosed into an unscratchable insect bite; by clocking out time, Walt was seeing unopened drawers everywhere. It was a seed of chaos, disrupting his whole life.
“It’s time to end this,” he sighed.
Getting into his 2007 drawer, Walt drove down the drawerway, stopped at the drawer light, and waited impatiently for the drawer gates to open at his apartment complex. Taking the drawers two at a time as he ran up to the second floor, Walt practically kicked down the drawer.
His room was just as he had left it, complete with the abomination hanging, unclosed. Making a mockery of him, and everything he stood for.
“I should have done this ages ago.” Walt reached up, took the handles…
…and yanked the drawer out of his dresser. With a grunt, he brained it against the wall, smashing it in an explosion of socks and pressboard.
“That’s what you get,” he panted heavily. “Stupid drawer, ruining my whole day.”
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