His desk was always a mess.
Not the charming kind of creative chaos that artists and writers like to claim. Just a proper, respectable mess. Papers, cables, pens, and documents that had been terribly important yesterday and were already impossible to explain today.
Sometimes you could even find a coffee cup in there.
Occasionally, it still had coffee in it.
And yet the man who owned this desk loved order.
A very particular kind of order.
For one thing, he collected little boxes.
Not stamps. Not coins. Not antique watches. Boxes. Plastic ones, metal ones, wooden ones. Boxes with lids, dividers, compartments. He was particularly fond of boxes that contained smaller boxes.
A normal person who came across two hundred assorted screws in the garage would toss them into a bag and forget about them.
Not our man.
He would pour all two hundred onto the table and start sorting. By length, diameter, type of head, and several other characteristics most people didn't even know screws had.
Every type deserved its own box.
And if he didn't have the right box, that wasn't a problem. It was an excellent excuse to buy another.
Sometimes he bought boxes when he had absolutely nothing to put in them.
Just in case.
You never know when new screws might enter your life.
The habit started in childhood.
One of his favourite activities was cleaning the bookshelves. Not the kind of cleaning where your mother tells you to dust and you explain that the dust is actually protecting the furniture from scratches.
No. He would voluntarily take every single book off the shelf.
Every. Single. One.
He'd wipe down the books, clean the shelves, then begin putting everything back.
That was when the fun started.
The books could go by author. By subject. By size. By series. Sometimes one new book refused to fit into the existing system, and the whole arrangement had to be reconsidered.
Other kids were outside playing soccer.
He was rearranging encyclopedias.
And he was perfectly happy.
As he got older, very little changed. The bookshelves simply gave way to cupboards, drawers, tools, and an ever-growing collection of little boxes.
Few things pleased him more than opening a forgotten drawer and discovering complete anarchy.
Wonderful. Several hours of satisfying work ahead.
Empty it. Spread everything out. Decide what to keep. Throw out what he could bear to part with. Sort the rest into categories.
And every serious cleanup turned into a little archaeological expedition.
There might be a coin that had somehow ended up behind a cabinet. An old postcard he'd forgotten about. A tiny part from an unidentified appliance. Or a mysterious bit of metal that any reasonable person would put straight into the garbage.
Not him.
That piece of metal would definitely come in handy one day.
What for? Impossible to say. But surely it hadn't survived fifteen years in that drawer for nothing.
Sometimes he'd uncover three identical screwdrivers. The first two had been misplaced, so naturally he'd had to buy a third.
If anything, that proved how important proper organization was.
The old postcards were another matter. He might stop cleaning altogether for a few minutes, looking at a photograph or reading a message from someone he hadn't thought about in years.
You open a drawer to get rid of junk and find a little piece of your own life instead.
Of course, the postcard would then need a suitable box.
There was just one problem.
None of this applied to his desk.
The desk had a life of its own.
Every so often he tried to tame it. He bought pen holders, folders, organizers. Sometimes he even cleared the entire surface.
The results were spectacular.
For about two days.
Then the papers started multiplying, the cables became entangled, new pens appeared from nowhere, and the documents settled into distinct geological layers.
But the paper clips in the drawer underneath were sorted to perfection.
One day, he wondered what exactly was wrong with him.
How could a man look at a mountain of papers right in front of him without the slightest concern, yet feel an almost physical pleasure from sorting fifty identical nails?
Eventually, he worked it out.
It wasn't really order he loved. It was the act of creating it.
A desk needs constant attention. Clean it today and in two days you're right back where you started.
But a box of neatly sorted screws? That's a finished project.
A tiny victory over chaos.
Everything in its place. Every category clearly labelled. No uncertainty. No loose ends.
At least until someone in the family drops a random nut into the screw box.
Years passed.
The boy who loved dusting books and sorting nails went into science.
Now he sorted data instead of screws, worked with databases instead of bookshelves, and had spreadsheets, categories, and endless computer folders instead of little boxes.
He still loved taking a huge pile of scattered information and turning it into a system that made sense.
Naturally, his computer desktop contained forty-seven files with names like FINAL, FINAL_2, REVISED, and THIS_ONE_IS_ACTUALLY_FINAL.
Some things never change.
Sometimes he suspected he had chosen science for one reason only: laboratories are full of tiny tubes that fit beautifully into specially designed boxes.
Still, one question remained.
If he was so good at organizing books, tools, scientific data, and entire databases of companies, why couldn't he organize his own life?
Maybe he just hadn't found the right box yet.