I get fixated on things. And it’s never the right things. I know that if I want to get any work done at all today I have to mentally put JD in a box and throw away the key.

No. That’s too sinister.

Sitting on the edge of my bed I practice one of the many visualization exercises my therapist has helped me with. I close my eyes and picture JD. Which is ridiculous, because I have no idea what she looks like. She’s an animated silhouette of a woman. Not tall, not short, not curvy, not skinny. She’s a she-blob. Then, in my mind, I offer an elbow and lead her to a car. She was funny and cute so I make sure the car is cool. How about an old-school Camaro? Candy apple red. I open the driver’s seat door and help her in. Drive safe, I tell her in my mind, see you after work. I wave while the silhouette drives the Camaro out of sight.

There. That oughtta do it. I’ll think about JD when I’m done with my workday.

Ten hours later, the very second I close my computer for the day, the Camaro is squealing back into the parking lot of my frontal lobe. I mostly work from home so at five o’clock on the dot I’m already standing in my kitchen, staring blankly into a fridge full of produce while my brain is neck-deep in the mystery of who this woman is.

She’s someone I know well enough to recognize her voice, but not well enough to have called or texted her before last night.

Unfortunately, the whole random letters instead of an actual contact name is a fairly common occurrence for me. One of the things that’s special about my brain is that letters and numbers are really hard for me to decipher. Dyslexia is what they called it when I was growing up. But once I made it to college and had access to student services I was diagnosed with a whole slew of other learning disorders as well. The long and short is that concentrating doesn’t come naturally to me and neither does reading.

Having someone watch me while I hunt and peck my approximated guess at how to spell their name into my contacts list is basically my worst nightmare. Generally when I have a new person to add to my address book I just jab at a random mix of letters to save face and then the second I’m alone, I go back and fix it at my leisure, un-surveilled. Unfortunately, I have occasionally forgotten to go back and fix it in the past. And JD is one of those casualties. At some point, I stood next to her, heard her name, and pretended to input it into my phone.