Tidying Up

My mother always tells me

That for a person with OCD,

I live like a rat in the subway,

With everything around me

As messy as it could get,

And I explain to her that

Some of us find disorganization

To be the only peaceful thing,

And when she dismisses it off

As a shaky excuse that I make

To get away from doing chores,

I wink at her and tell her,

"Wait till you have a look at my mind",

She rolls her eyes and walks away,

While I pause to think about what I just said,

And indeed, out of everything

Around me that is severely disorganized,

It's my mind that is so cluttered,

That if spiders could go in

And build a web, they probably would;

So today, I sit down to empty

The mammoth drawer of my mind,

With a tiny hope that by the end,

I'll be able to show my mother

That at least one aspect of me

Having intense OCD ticks off her checklist;

I reach into the farthest corner,

And pull out a memory from when

I was five and a bike mildly hit me

While I was crossing the road on my birthday,

There weren't any injuries,

But I did hit my head on the ground,

Which is the crux of many jokes that

My family makes about me being silly at times;

From another part of the drawer,

I pull out a memory of the time

When we adopted a puppy in our old house,

And called her Maria, and how she'd be there

Whenever I would come back from school,

But one day, the municipality folks

Poisoned the strays of the colony,

And when I came back from school,

I found Maria in a saddening pool

Of her own vomit and blood,

Lying in the same spot where

She waited for me everyday till her last breath;

Another memory came flying to me

Like a piece of paper in the wind,

I caught it to find the memory of

A certified coward groping my body

When I was fifteen, and in a crowd,

I crumpled the memory into a ball

And threw it into the trash can,

But it somehow made its way

Back into the drawer and settled

In a dark, mouldy corner;

I found memories of my first kiss,

My last attempt to kill myself,

The trip to Ooty where dad fell sick,

My sister's wedding, my first salary,

And all the times I made a clown of myself,

Finally, after eons, I closed the drawer,

Knowing it was enough decluttering

For one day and perhaps,

This drawer can never be emptied

In the first place, it can just keep

Accumulating more instances,

As if it's an abyss, a bottomless pit,

One that can hold everything,

And still have some room left.

//NaPoWriMo, Day 30