Quiet Numbers

The radio clicks from nineteen to twenty.

I exhale like I’ve been holding my breath underwater, though I hadn’t noticed going under. The song sounds the same. The room looks the same. Nothing in the universe acknowledges the correction, but my chest loosens anyway.

I tell myself I don’t care. I tell myself it’s coincidence. I tell myself I could leave it at nineteen and nothing bad would happen. The volume knob sits there, daring me to prove it. Like a schoolyard bully it pokes me in the chest and calls me out. I can’t tell if it’s taunting me to change it or confirm my mettle by leaving it alone.

I imagine the consequences. Not specific ones. Just the feeling of having missed something important. Like leaving the house and knowing I am forgetting something that I will need later but I have no idea what. It will gnaw at me though. The number nineteen hums with that feeling. Twenty is quiet.

It’s not just the even numbers that sit politely. There is one exception to the odds. Fives are cordial. They are allowed. The zeros in the tens are place keepers. They are permitted like someone that is hired to sit in your seat when an award ceremony is on live television. Those are the only numbers that close cleanly.

I try to remember when I learned this rule. There is no ceremony. No origin story. The closest thing to it I can remember was not wanting to step on a crack or “I’d break my mother’s back”. I remember trying to never step on a crack even though my mother seldom got out of bed as it was. Maybe something worse might happen. Maybe I wasn’t even protecting her. I still had the sense that someone in the world was better off because of my hyper-vigilance. One day the wrong numbers started to itch like that. The right ones stopped the itch. That was enough.

The television in the other room is on seventeen. I can feel it from the hallway, like a crooked picture frame I can’t see but know is tilted. I don’t move yet. I wait. I test myself. My brain offers bargains.

You don’t have to fix it, it says.

Just think about fixing it.

That is worse. The pressure builds anyway, a low static behind my eyes. The number doesn’t threaten me. It doesn’t speak. It doesn’t need to. It simply exists incorrectly.

I stand up.

The remote is warm in my hand, as if it’s been waiting. Seventeen becomes eighteen. Relief floods in, immediate and undeserved. My shoulders drop. The static vanishes. For some reason my head no longer wants to explode.

Nothing has been saved.

I know this. I know the number has no power. I know the world was never in danger. I know I didn’t prevent anything except my own dread.

Still, I linger, just to be sure.

I lower it to sixteen, then back to eighteen, sealing the fix. Somehow, in my mind, seventeen was louder than eighteen, like a fire alarm that goes off when making toast. It’s safe but my brain alerts me to the danger anyways. Sweet relief comes with eighteen. Even. Clean. The quiet settles in again.

Later, while I am driving, the car stereo lands on twenty-one. I feel the old itch wake up, polite but persistent. I laugh out loud this time, because it’s ridiculous. Because I know better.

The itch waits to be scratched.

At the next red light, I reach for the dial. Twenty-two. Peace, again. Cheap, fast, temporary. Is this what heroine feels like?

I drive on, volume even, wondering how many times I’ll have to learn that nothing happened before I believe it. I haven’t yet.

The radio plays. The world remains intact.

My brain stays vigilant. My OCD protecting me from nothing but myself.

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