My parents never approved of much, but certainly even they would get a kick from knowing I ran him over.

My foot hovered over the accelerator as I weighed the options. The alley was deserted, except for the two of us. Although I couldn’t see his face, it was unmistakably him. I could tell by the crooked outline of his thin frame, with his head in its permanently bowed state. With hands buried deeply in the pockets of his tired blue trench coat, he shifted down the street, looking over his shoulder with every step. I hadn’t seen him in months and never expected to again, but right now fate had placed him in my path one last time, giving me a unique opportunity to restore the balance once and for all.

He didn’t notice me. Though he would have no trouble recognizing my green Civic with all the dents, there was no way he could identify it while my headlights pointed right at him. It was now or never. And after everything he’d done, this was the least I could do. My hands gripped the wheel. My thumb smarted from where a nail had been bitten too deeply. My heart pounded in my chest and adrenalin popped, like little bursts of acid in the back of my throat. And then, after just the merest hesitation, my foot collapsed on the accelerator and the car lurched into action.

How did I end up here? What series of events led to this moment where it seemed like a good idea to flatten a person with my car? Perhaps it was all predestined long before I was born, during that fateful moment when cells divide and one sperm containing a selection of Dad’s choicest genes meets an egg containing the finest, or perhaps not so fine, pickings from Mum’s DNA. After all, mental illness is something we are born with, and obsessive compulsive disorder is most certainly written in the genes. Thought to be caused by an over activity in the error-processing part of the brain, the sufferer of OCD is permanently under the impression that something is wrong and needs to be fixed. That’s why we check and double check every little detail, never realizing that no matter how many times we verify that we haven’t left on the oven or locked the dog on the balcony, we will never shake that nagging feeling that something is amiss. At least not without divine intervention from the overlords at Roche Pharmaceuticals and their yummy little white pills called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which numb those restless brain areas.

So yes, obsessive compulsive disorder is a physical disease of the brain, and although I worked daily to keep it hidden from the world, I had been checking and counting things for as long as I could remember. But could OCD alone explain everything, particularly since we tend to be non-violent and rarely are we found in cars trying to run people over? If I were to pinpoint an exact time when things went from lumbering along averagely to the downward path that led to this moment, I would have to say that it all began the day I moved out of my parents’ house.

I left home to prove that I could, and then became preoccupied with loneliness. Until then I had never experienced loneliness, though had always rated it among my top-ten fears, along with ownership of material things and the house burning down. I suppose it was only natural, after a lifetime of coming home, not so much to my parents, but to my social animal of a brother who never so much as blew his nose without an entourage of friends to cheer him on. I wasn’t good at making friends, but it didn’t matter, as my brother, Claude, was the master, with a constant invasion of people in our house. It wasn’t unusual to come home and find students living in one of the spare rooms, or crashed out under the kitchen table. Once I even tripped over two potheads who had taken up residence on my bedroom floor. Our kitchen was everybody’s kitchen, and our parents had little to say in the matter as they fled the city every weekend, and when they were home, their bedroom was an almost self-contained unit covering the top two floors of our tall London townhouse, accessible only by elevator. It was an ideal situation for a pair of youths and all their friends.

I never went to the trouble of making my own friends, nor did I burden myself with the dull chore of phoning people just to stay in touch. And best of all, I never had to concern myself with making plans for the weekend, because if I wanted company, all I had to do was stay home. But, as with all things, this charmed existence was doomed to end, and my brother began consorting with a nice Jewish girl and spending weekends drinking scotch with her father. So when strange people stopped exercising squatter’s rights in our house, I knew that if I didn’t leave, I was going to get left behind.

So I packed my bags and moved to an apartment ten minutes down the road. The entire apartment was smaller than my old bedroom and I hated it. But at twenty-eight years old, too old to run back home, my only option was to love this new place whether I liked it or not. On the day of the move, my mother, myself, and a man with a van transported my worldly belongings, which, after twenty-eight years, could have fitted into a spotted handkerchief tied to a stick. The entire experience took less than two hours, whereupon the living room boasted a couch, a coffee table, and a small oval dining table with four chairs, all overflow from my parents’ house. Unlike me, my mother hoarded in preparation for the apocalypse. In the bedroom was a double bed and one bedside table. Mum had tried to give me two, but I didn’t understand the logic in two bedside tables when I could only sleep on one side of the bed at a time. My parents said that my aversion to owning things was a rebellion against the privileged life they had offered me. Of course, I let them believe that. How could I tell them the truth, that too much stuff was more terrifying than the thought of being fed slowly through a meat grinder? They wouldn’t understand. Hell, sometimes I didn’t understand.

All my stuff, including the television, was assigned to the bedroom. Two narrow closets faced the bed. The left was a hanging closet that easily contained all my clothes. The right consisted of floor-to-ceiling shelves, so I unscrewed the doors and stored all my belongings, a few books and other trinkets that had been spared the garbage heap, over just four of those shelves. The television filled the alcove between these two closets. As the living room was devoid of all personal belongings, there was no reason to ever spend time there. Perhaps a large studio would have been more suited to my needs than a one-bedroom apartment. I had even viewed some attractive studio apartments, but turned them down, reasoning that real grown ups had living rooms. That first night, as I stared up at the grey ceiling that seemed much closer to my face than my old warm, cream-colored ceiling, I did not feel grown up and I did not feel free. I felt a million miles from home, and for the first time in my life, felt truly lonely.

The real trouble began the following day when selecting bedding and curtains. I strutted confidently into the store, knowing that all my soft furnishings would be red, just as they had been in my beloved old bedroom. I did not expect to get home with a new bed cover and find that instead of inviting me to sink into its warm hug, the deep red sucked all the light and bestowed upon the tiny space all the warmth of a tomb. Not a good start. Now I had to find a new color and had no clue where to begin. So I began everywhere, and found that blue was too cold, yellow too warm, and beige was for people with no imagination. So I reverted back to red, expecting a lighter shade to possibly work. It did not. Every bedcover survived one night before being banished back to the store, guilty of not being that perfect hue that would create a harmonious balance between light and dark and transport me to a Zen-like state where I would feel at one with the world. Was that really such a lot to ask? Of course, it didn’t help that the apartment was uninviting. Like a train, each tiny room led into the next, and the windows narrowly missed the sun at all hours of the day.

Over the next few weeks, I bought and returned so many bed covers from shops along my route to and from work that I worried the shop keepers might start recognizing me and think I was crazy. But if they could see the storage closet that I was trying to turn into a home, perhaps they would agree that it was an impossible task, and not think less of me for trying. 

Then, after weeks of getting nowhere with the bed, it occurred to me (in one of those eureka moments that most people win prizes for but that I would later come to regret) that perhaps the lighting was wrong. If I would just get the lighting right, then everything else would slot naturally into place. So, I embarked on a new and even more absurd mission, which involved testing different color lampshades with different strengths of light bulb. Surprisingly (yes, I actually was surprised), instead of resolving the issue, I had compounded it. The light was either too bright and glaring, or too dark and gloomy. Additionally there was the issue of the light’s color, which, depending on the choice of lampshade, was always either too grey or too yellow. All my efforts were unable to reproduce that warm, clear glow that makes a person not want to hang themselves, much like the one I had naively taken for granted in my previous life. And the more I stared, the blurrier the surroundings became. Thus began the daily buying and exchanging of lampshades and the discovery of a new set of shops whose time I would waste on a daily basis.

I spent months trying to love my new home, but like horseradish, it didn’t become more palatable just by repeated exposure. Some nights I cowered in the car, staring up at the building and hoping for divine inspiration. Or just a new pair of eyes would have been nice. A heaviness seeped, like mercury, into my veins and settled in my heels, making it a superhuman effort to walk. By day I dragged my wretched carcass to work in a genetics lab and in the evenings went to university to study for a biology degree. All day I fought the urge to fall asleep in the lab and sometimes caught myself drooling into the test tubes and contaminating them with my DNA. Then once home, I spent hours in my personal torture chamber, unable to shut off my brain and ready to sell my soul to anything or anyone who would show me just five minutes of uninterrupted peace.