* — December 1, 2022
Adam Dalva — The Drawer

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Today on Zoom, my psychiatrist told me that people who have an obsessive need to keep their houses clean tend to have one filthy drawer. They surreptitiously jam dreck in; they’d hate for anyone to see their broken tchotchkes, their used-up batteries, their rattling crumbs. The mess is a necessary counterbalance to all that hard-won cleanness. I watched my own face, puffy with grief, react on screen. My apartment is messier than ever; my obsessive-compulsive disorder has gotten worse, too. I pick, I mumble, I loop.

Until recently, I’d always had a drawer of my own. A repository. The better I did in life, the messier it got, filled with excoriating critiques, drafts never filed. I’ve never written about my drawer. Some of my closest friends didn’t know it existed, and no one except me knew how deep it went. The drawer where I was most known. The drawer—the beautiful, maddening drawer, with its gorgeous marquetry veneer, its broken hinges, and, inside, its stained, stuffed rabbit—now empty, bare.

(This is really a story about my brother, who never read anything beyond the first two paragraphs.)
 

Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 10. View full issue & more.
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Adam Dalva’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and The New York Review of Books. He is the Senior Fiction Editor of Guernica Magazine.