How to Build a House of Cards: the Comprehensive Guide to Living With OCD — Alethea Lohse
Step 1:
Create a sturdy foundation using only inherently unstable materials.
Obviously,
you know
it’s irrational.
Your hands must be spotless.
You’ve now washed them
long enough that the water’s run cold
but you can’t
stop.
You scrub the soap in
so frantically, the skin on your palms
breaks. Blood stains
white suds peony pink.
Burning, torn flesh
washes down to clog the drain
and you
are still
not
clean.
Step 2:
Cautiously stack upwards, risking destruction with every addition.
“Healing” looks like a small, warm office–
glaring fluorescent lights,
a sofa that seems to swallow you.
Therapy is yet another routine,
comforting in its familiarity.
The easing scent of artificial citrus,
a sharp, cooling taste of mint.
The same questions,
the same answers.
“Are you aware these behaviors aren’t healthy?”
“Is this your way of maintaining
control?”
“What are you
so afraid
of?”
Step 3:
Repeat the delicate balance, again and again and again and again.
You live your days walking a tightrope.
Step, by shaky step, staring
into the abyss of madness gaping,
endless and waiting
at your feet.
You do not know if
those rituals and routines you cling to
are the fraying highwire, your last
salvation—
or the looming void
that threatens to
consume you.
Step 4:
Be ready for it all to come crashing down around you.
A house of cards can never last long.
No matter how careful,
Shaking hands
always
eventually
slip.
Paper-thin
pieces of
yourself
flutter
down
onto
the
floor.
You pick them
back up
and
you try
again.
Alethea (Jamie) Lohse is a young queer artist in her senior year at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts Creative Writing Department. She explores all genres in her work but specializes in sequential art, Southern Gothic fiction, and free verse poetry. She currently serves as Community Engagement Director for Élan International Student Literary Magazine and hopes to study anthropology in college.
wireless — Nathaniel Im
anyway, i keep thinking about the old laptop we passed around after school,
blue light pooling over our faces like a second puberty—hot,
cords under your desk, knotted around our feet.
do you remember that? the fan’s buttery whir, the screen
exhaling its pixel glow while we typed to each other from
four inches apart, earbuds splitting one song between us.
god, they were so tangled—the rubber lined ones
hoarding earwax, secrets, they tugged and caught
impish phrases swapped on laggy desktop calls, our voices
jittering like cicadas against the plastic mic grill.
kids now won’t understand what that click was like, i swear
light shifted the moment the plugs aligned, a small spark sending
minute currents pressing inward and tracing
narrow seams of heat as they bloomed where the metal met metal. remember?
only then did the static settle into a low buzz in our brains.
pretty soon we had bluetooth, though, and in the room
quiet spread thickly across the walls
rising and falling like a lung set loose from its body.
soon everything would move that way. weightless, instant and
to touch nothing became the rule, whooshing cleanly over our bent knees,
untethered currents skimming overhead, quick as breath, wires splitting infinite.
video is so crisp now,
washes the screen into one mean plane.
xeric shadows thinning to husks under that overbright sheen,
you now watch them slide down, smooth as rain on glass,
zero softness left for anything that moves slower than its light.
Nathaniel Im, a junior at Portsmouth Abbey, engineers wearables that predict falls in the elderly—analyzing a stride's rhythm the way he scans Latin verse for meter and caesura. He's developing Kinetic Verse, a digital anthology pairing poems with movement visualizations, and preparing his first print collection. When he's not writing or coding, he's wrestling his dad in the snow or plotting Secret Santa twists—his veggie-hating brother once unwrapped ten cabbages, Pokémon cards buried underneath.
When my psychiatrist tries to explain my bipolar disorder to me — Kate Choi
The graph doesn’t get it. The sine function
waving like a white flag, the clean curves
of the concave, the current electric cold.
Two ice caps cut and crystallized. The lines
speak another language, curled with disdain:
psych-talk, Greek thrown around hasty as my hands
shuddering around a keyboard at 3AM.
Me, I’m a handful of pills and a shiver at midnight.
Me, I’m a slut for attention on my arms,
a victim of late-stage capitalism, a good Christian
who lost her way. An addict and an error
and never going to make it past twenty-seven.
I’m conforming, I’m shrinking, but I still want to be
everything they tell me I am, embraced
with wide arms and an open mouth.
There are the breathy instructions: breathe wide
open your eyes slowly or is it breathe slow
open your eyes wide—from the meditation app,
the medication trap, the new-world psychotherapist crap—
Everything defined by a prefix of too-much or not-enough:
hypomanic, hypersomnia, hypothymia.
The graph doesn’t get it. Blank and corporate,
it’s the mechanical curve of an undefined limit.
Top to bottom dissected into borderlines, roadkill
split open at the side of the road. Watch it rot.
The car passes by and you meet my eye,
glistening raw and red in the meaty sunlight.
They tell me: it goeth before the fall. I laugh
and I say try and stop me.
Kate Choi is a high school junior currently living in Seoul, South Korea. She writes fiction and poetry, and is currently attending Asia Pacific International School. Her publications include Paper Cranes Literary, The Amazine, and Young Writers Journal.