Touch not, move not, breathe not. Welcome to the Museum of the Mad Queen.

Imagine, if you can, your world, dominated and controlled by an other.

Your home dictated by the desires, the whims, the neuroses and psychoses of that other.

Your home overtaken by a dysfunction and malfunction and needs to control so pronounced that you forfeit any and all rights to exist.

You cease to be seen. You do not matter. You are the thorn to be pulled from the lion’s paw, a burden to be extricated, a person who needs to Go. because you’re the problem. Saneness and reason cannot coexist with frightening irrationality and deep neuroses. Oil and water. Tensions erupt. Can’t work, ever.

Imagine, if you can, a kitchen reflecting a comfortable state of living and use. Clean, its contents neither messy nor arranged with military precision. Things are as they are and what they are and they are pleasing and practical.

Imagine retiring and the next morning awakening to a kitchen where any item — pick any! — one as innocuous as a dishrag or dishwashing soap bottle or bowl — used during the day and in the middle of the night returned to its perfect position.

When you last saw the kitchen or any other common room, it looked like someone lives there. The next morning, it’s again a photo out of Better Homes and Gardens. The dishtowels hang on their rack, folded in 4-star hotel fashion. The cat bowl, normally over there atop the counter for kitty’s treats, sits soaking in the sink. In the VERY same spot in the sink each time.

Even though it was clean, it soaks into squeaky bright spotless eggshell porcelain. It shines like the rest of the kitchen. Any speck of food, any dropleet of coffee or tomato juice or tea on a countertop wiped clean in the middle of the night. The room may sparkle to the eye yet it stinks to high heaven under a toxic cloud of an other’s Absolute Reign.

Every morning, every common room in the house looks as if it’d been visited, cleaned and rearranged by neurotic elves in the night. Elves who can’t endure a cap of the soap bottle opened or facing any direction but perfectly straight facing the sink.

Imagine, if you can, the tortuous wickedness that could ensue by someone (say, you) playing with a woman’s madness. Reangle the soap bottle, why, she can’t live with it!! Turn the toaster slightly askew out of perfect alignment with the refrigerator. Shift the sponge holder a half inch toward the wall away from its picture-perfect forward-facing spot along the sink. Why, it could drive her mad!

Except …. except she’s already mad! Driving someone mad becomes dangerous. Especially when madness is coupled with an unbalanced mind, a passive-aggressive unpredictable Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, well, then there are only two solutions: She’s committed or lives alone or someone moves.

That all common rooms are arranged to Better Homes and Gardens perfection night after night when others sleep is frightening. No remote can be left on the glass table, ever. It MUST be returned to the bowl on the table. A big ceramic bowl. Not only returned to the bowl but positioned in perfect alignment with the other two remotes.

The rocking chair is moved but a few inches for access to the sliding door. It cannot so remain. It WILL be moved back to its perfect spot if not immediately then certainly by the next day.

Each day, for me, not begun at work at dawn is begun with two cups of coffee brewed in a small pot.

One morning I returned to the kitchen for the second cup. The coffee was gone – dumped – and the burner switched off. She lives in fear of a electric brewer, even a tiny one, left on. She denied she’d done it. She denied it to me and blatantly lied to the second roommate and house owner. She knew she’d done it. I knew she had. He however chooses to believe her. Believe her lies. A twisted convoluted thing goin’ on there.

It’s life in a museum of a mad woman. Touch nothing. Move nothing. Move it in the course of living and it WILL be returned to its perfect position as dictated and determined by the mad queen with extreme control issues.

The Museum of a Mad Queen.

And she, its curator, likes things dead. Unbreathing. Unmoving. Things, whether hers or otherwise, are subjects to manipulate. Subject to manipulation. People — those whom she decides she dislikes — are hers to control. Those she likes are hers to impress with cloying appearances and ploying charms. A facade to maintain. She must. A crack in the glossy surface and picture-perfect world reveals a dark and demented woman.

She can’t have that. She can’t have life. She must reign with total control in the home. Subtle and perhaps imperceptible, save to those astute and perceptive. The devil indeed is in the details and to those with sharp perceptions and keen sensibilities it’s always always the tiniest details overlooked by the majority that scream the loudest.

Some time ago I tried to pen a description of the roommate to my sister.

“Something very not right and scary about this woman. Little things that are very telling. She’s the woman in a book or film who’d stay up through the night, compulsively rearranging all items back to perfection, refolding towels and dishrags to hotel-style, arranging the 1,000 pennies in her collection all head’s up and aligned in the same direction, then one day when a visitor calls and makes an innocent offhanded remark about {anything} she snaps. Whacks her with an ax Lizzie Bordon-style.

Dangerous and by the time police arrive, she’ll have retreated. She’s like that. A sneaky stalker.”

My move from The House of the Deceiver and (Her) Believer (residence no. 5 since July) gets underway today.

I’m turning in my entrance ticket into this, this Museum of the Mad Queen. On it is printed: No exchanges. No refunds. No returns.

No problem.

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