I look through my backpack on Sunday night before going to bed. I check for any unarranged corners. Neatly stacked books, tucked-in lunchbox, tightly rolled poster. They all come together like puzzle pieces -- complete coherence. But my pencil case lays on the floor of my bag, pushed to the side. A smear to the perfect arrangement. It’s nothing, but a broken alarm wails, splitting my head and forcing me to act. I quickly grab the pencil case and carefully place it in its perfectly sized pocket.

I am in the middle of English class. The room is so quiet that it rings. I trace the first few words of my introductory sentence with a steady hand and conclude the sentence with a neat period. I begin the next, but my eyes swivel back to what I have just written. It is as though lines have jostled on their own, so utterly imperfect. The “a” and “b” of my word “about” are too close together. As I stare at the space between them, they seem to conjoin, ink blurred and glued. Last night’s broken alarm cries, shattering the silence of the room. I hastily fold the paper into perfect fourths and pick a new sheet from my backpack.

Everything changes when I get to high school. Classes become more difficult, and while I am still able to micromanage everything, new responsibilities present themselves to be uncontrollable and immaterial. My fingers reach for a new obsession -- test scores -- but this infatuation is numb and deceptive. It is not out of care for my academic progress that drives me; there is no joy in receiving perfect scores. Rather, it is the relief from seeing a line of complete numbers stretching down the column, unbroken and steady. But for the first time since youth, my obsessive-compulsive disorder taxes me severely. Days in unbroken monochrome and somnambulism and one dimension. I am a husk. I become the alarm, this monster that has overtaken me. And I live on.

It has now been years, yet nothing has changed. The days and weeks and months blur into one collective movement, one undistracted purpose. Today, Mr. Deshay picks up a stack of graded exams and begins to walk around the room. I feel my heart beat louder. A paper flutters in front of me, and I quickly flip the top over. 

92. My stomach shrinks and my throat closes on itself. The alarm --  my lifeblood but also my shadow -- blares, crying. I am spiteful of my errors, but I feel ridiculous at the same time. 92 is a good score. I would be happy with this, so why can’t I be? Why does this alarm make me its host and fill my mind with such desensitizing persistence?

The next second, my head starts bombarding me with painful questions. Why does this perfection matter in the first place? What is the whole point of it? If happiness isn’t what I am getting out of this, why should I succumb to OCD? I wonder why these questions have never occurred to me before. Then it hits me. If it’s a broken alarm that bothers me, why can’t I just fix it? The power to fix my broken alarm has always been within myself, laying dormant.

The next day, I wake up and start packing my bag to get ready for school. Just when I’m about to zip up my bag, I notice the end of my pen sticking out of the pencil case. My alarm beeps. But so what? I carry my backpack and head out the door. For the first time, such imperfection gives me a breeze of relief, as if I have taken off my old, torn clothes.