𝐬𝐨𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫, 𝐬𝐨𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐬𝐭, cobain

four.

          EGGSHELLS WITH EGGSHELLS. Navy with navy. Whites with whites. Blacks with blacks. La Perlas with La Perlas. But no—there it was, a white lost in the off-white fringe, disrupting the careful order. I snatched the hanger holding my snow-white dress, repositioning it within its proper place. Stepping back, I surveyed the meticulously color-coded closet, still sipping my chilled, hours-old coffee.

I set the coffee down on my nightstand and stumbled through a pile of distressed jeans strewn on my bedroom floor to seize a notepad and a pen. I placed the pen between my teeth and chewed off the cap, tracing a line over a scribbled bullet point that read simply, "clothes." My eyes trailed down the list to the next bullet point—the very last one—which said, "Organize books."

Ash rapped his knuckles against my open door, leaning his head against the doorframe. "Isn't it enough of that?" He let himself into my room, hands tucked into the pockets of his pajama pants, watching me in my frantic state. Given my obsessive need for order, he was fairly certain I had some kind of compulsive disorder—though the name escaped him. He'd flunked Psychology 101 in college, after all.

I had already crossed the room to my bookshelf, a puff of wind from my lips blowing away the dust from my old, annotated Edgar Allen Poe stories I hadn't touched since high school, its pages frayed and falling apart from the seams. "In the middle of something, Ash!"

"C'mon, sis," he insisted, pulling me back from the action. "You've been at this shit all day."

I ignored him, inspecting a collection of poetry composed by Emily Dickinson. "You know, I think you should start writing poetry again. I have some Dickinson if you need inspiration."

Ash pulled out the cigarettes from behind each of his ears, placing the two of them in his mouth like tusks. I slipped one from his lips and put it in mine, unlit, to self-soothe. 

"I haven't written anything in years," he said. 

I recalled an incident from his senior year when he was suspended for a poem he submitted in AP Lit—Hamlet's Harlots—a satirical piece imagining Shakespeare's sexual "tendencies" and affairs beneath his desk as he wrote Hamlet. His poetry phase faded soon after, but poet or not, he certainly dressed the part—fitted skinny jeans, corduroy jackets, and satchels. 

I took a deep breath, resting against the sharp corner of the bookshelf. I heard the flick! of a lighter, and Ash's smoke clouded my vision. I quickened my pace around the room.

"Get the hell out of his room, Erin. For your own sanity." His loose-hanging cigarette flopped up and down between his lips as he spoke. "Dad's about to make food, come down."

"No, I like to organize." I tossed the notepad next to my books. Completing my lists felt as if they were the only manageable thing in my life, something that I had the utmost control over. They kept me anchored and steady, especially after receiving a letter from my mother earlier that day, although we hadn't spoken since I left California. She considered it a betrayal of sorts that I'd accede to my father's insistence on leaving everything behind.

"Whatever. Offer's still on the table if you wanna join us at some point." He spied my room one last time, taking a drag off his cigarette. "Whenever you're out your funk."

I brought myself to a standstill, removing the cigarette from my lips. I gulped a large intake of air and slunk toward the intact letter my mother had sent me. It lay on my untidy bed, and instead of retrieving the envelope, I picked up the notepad that sat next to it and began to scrawl a pros and cons list on a blank page. My pros of reading the letter included: "Reconnect with Mom. Catch up with her, see how she's doing. Reach out for assistance. Update her on life." Meanwhile, my cons: "Get sucked back into her illness. Be blamed for ditching her. Going behind Dad's back."