10: the math

Day off. Medicated anyway, I don't skip weekends, I learned that lesson years ago. Kate's at brunch with people from her law office. I have the apartment and a spreadsheet and I've been at the table since nine.

I did the thing I do at the store when the numbers don't reconcile. I lined it all up.

Column A, date. Column B, pill or no pill. Column C, what I saw. Column D, how long the correction took. I went back through the notebook and this blog and I put in everything, even the probably-nothings, and then I sorted it.

Here's what the math says. Off the pill, six days, I logged nineteen things. On the pill, twenty-two days, I logged eight. Off the pill the corrections took seconds and I could count them. On the pill they were instant or they didn't happen at all, the thing was just wrong and stayed wrong, like the sign, like the logo.

So that's the correlation. Off the pill I see it happen. On the pill I only see that it happened. It's the difference between watching somebody move a rack and coming in Monday and finding the rack moved.

I sat with that for a while and then I wrote down the other version, because I promised myself I'd always write down the other version.

Off the pill, I'm sleep deprived, I'm dysregulated, and I write two thousand word entries about entropy at three in the morning. On the pill, I write four lines. Maybe there's no correlation between the medication and what's out there. Maybe the correlation is between the medication and what I'm willing to type. Maybe the meds are the only thing keeping me from writing entries like this.

Both versions fit the spreadsheet. I'm a person who reconciles counts for a living and I'm telling you both versions fit.

I've been taking a photo of the corridor every morning. Same spot, same angle, standing on the same tile, since the Monday after the door. I didn't mention it because it felt like overkill, and because the photos are boring, they're a hallway. Eleven photos now. Four doors, the clock, the sign, in every one.

This morning I put them side by side on the laptop.

They're the same photo.

I don't mean they look alike. I mean I flipped between them with the arrow key, one, two, three, all eleven, and nothing moves. The clock hands are in the same place, which they would be, I'm there at 7:40 every day, fine. But the crack catches the light the same. The scuff on the third tile is the same scuff. There's a bit of lint or something on the floor by the closet door, a little grey fleck, and it's in the same pixel in every single photo. Eleven mornings. Nobody swept it. Nobody kicked it. It's in the same pixel.

And the sign is red in all of them.

All eleven. Back to the first one, the Monday after the door, in March, when I stood in that hallway and looked at a faded sign and wrote about it. The photo from that morning has a bright red sign in it.

I'm medicated and I'm sitting at my kitchen table on a Sunday and I'm looking at eleven identical photographs. I want to say that's a phone glitch, that's a caching thing, that's the app showing me the same file. So I checked the file sizes. They're different. Different sizes, different timestamps, different everything, and the same picture.

Here's the theory and then I'm done for today because Kate will be home and I don't want to have to try to explain this to her. I don't think I'm being shown a hallway every morning. I think I'm being shown the hallway. One of it. The one that got made from everybody's memory of that kind of hallway, and it gets set out for me at 7:40 like a table setting, and it's the same because there's only one. And the day it wasn't the same, the day there were five doors, that was somebody putting out the wrong one.

And the sign was never faded. Or it was, and now it never was. The only place it's still faded is entry 01, a paragraph on a server somewhere, that I can't photograph. I'm going to keep taking the pictures. I'm going to keep taking the pill. I have eleven left in the bottle. I counted them. I've never counted before.