When I was four my family and I moved into an old three-story building in downtown Van Buren that we’d recently remodeled. There had been a lot of construction, and a lady who worked downtown paid me and my sister a penny for every nail we picked up off the ground. I guess it was my first job. I remember putting the money in some of those plastic easter eggs, putting the easter eggs in a drink carrier from McDonald’s, and then putting the drink carrier on a shelf in my closet. I can still see it–everything just so.

We’d lived in that house for about six weeks, and then one night while we were all gone, a semi-trailer truck lost control while coming down the big hill in front of our home that doubled as my dad’s drugstore. The fire started when the truck collided with a station wagon at the bottom of the hill, a station wagon with a family of seven inside. All seven people, along with the newly married couple in the semi-trailer truck, died. Three buildings, including ours, burned. The event made national news.

My memories surrounding the fire are pretty spotty. I remember that night seeing smoke in the sky from the front yard of my grandparents’ house. I remember sleeping on a pull-out couch that wasn’t ours. I remember getting hand-me-down stuffed animals. My aunt says I would arrange those stuffed animals according to height, that the year the fire happened was when I went from being a neat child to an extremely neat child.

At some point we settled into the house we’re in now, the house I really grew up in. My room was two doors down from where I am at the moment, and I can still picture the baby blue walls and the railroad-train wallpaper border that stayed the same until I became a teenager. Every now and then my dad would help me rearrange the furniture, but certain things never changed. Always the Legos sitting on top of the dresser were lined up parallel to the edges, the VHS tapes on the shelves in the closet were alphabetized, and the books on my desk were arranged according to height.

Everything just so.

I’m sure the fire was also when I started collecting basically anything that wasn’t worth a damn. That’s when I started hanging on. For a while I was into rabbit’s feet, which I hung individually by chains on a pegboard on the back of my closet door and arranged by color. And then there was Batman and then there was Coca-Cola (the new stuff, not the antiques). Every birthday or Christmas I’d take any newly acquired gifts and start searching for a place to put them. However, because things went into my room but rarely went out, finding empty shelf space became more and more of a challenge with each passing year.

Once after a birthday I remember lying in bed and my mom sitting on the edge. I’d gotten a bunch of new toys but didn’t know where to put them, and it was so overwhelming that I began to sob. Another time I dropped a paperback in the bathtub, and even though the book was okay, some of the pages got wrinkled. I recall being so upset that it was no longer perfect and how even after my mom bought me a new copy, I couldn’t get rid of the old one.

For nearly thirty years now, I’ve struggled with holding on and wanting everything to be perfect and just so. And whereas these things have been a challenge, they’ve also been my salvation, my way of bringing order to a chaotic world, a world where homes turn to smoke and fires take the lives of strangers just as easily as they take the lives of your stuffed animals. I’ve never been officially diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), but my psychologist friend Craig says a little OCD is functional. I know that my desire for order has come in handy in my life as a remodeler and interior decorator. Sometimes I like to think of myself as a household chiropractor, someone who can walk in, immediately spot any misaligned picture frames or candlesticks, and straighten everything up. Snap! There, that’s better.

Today after having lunch with my aunt Terri (the one who said the thing about the highly organized stuffed animals), I had coffee with my friend Kara, whom I’ve known since the fourth grade. Honestly, she’s one of my dearest friends, but she told me today that she’s learned things about me from the blog that she never knew before, like how much I’ve smoked over the years. (A number of other people have echoed this sentiment.) I guess we all do that to some extent, try to control the information that other people know about us, since no one likes to be judged. I know that for the longest time it was easy to stay in the closet because I’d only date people out of town. I could have a boyfriend on nights and weekends, but I never had to mix that part of my life with my family or my friends at the dance studio.

Kara accurately described this sort of behavior as compartmentalizing. Work goes over here. Friends from high school go over here. And let’s see–sex and cigarettes go waaaaaaaayy over there. I told Kara that I thought I’d made a lot of progress. I don’t compartmentalize nearly as much as I used to. (She agreed.) I guess it’s harder to do when you put a good majority of your thoughts, feelings, and secrets on the damn internet. There’s a certain amount of control that’s given up every time you get real with yourself, write it down, and hit the “Publish” button. In this sense, perhaps I’ve come a long way from that scared, little four-year old who lost his stuffed animals, the one who thought he needed to find a way to control the uncontrollable.

Still, this evening when I unpacked my bag from the weekend, I put my socks in one drawer, my shorts in another, and my t-shirts in the closet–according to color. I organized my calendar for the week. And then I put my change in an orange bowl, which–now that I think about it–looks not unlike an easter egg. All this I did in my sister’s old room, the room I now sleep in, the one with the bed where I lie awake and worry about things like whether or not I’ll ever move to Austin, how my body will recover from my recent car accident, and if I’ll ever be a husband. Of course, all of these thoughts are overwhelming, and sometimes I feel like that small child who doesn’t know where to put everything in his life. But then I sit down at my laptop and–word by word–place my entire chaotic world extremely neatly on a page, all the while wondering if this is simply another way to hold on, another way to get everything just so.