There’s a cart at the library, the return cart, that gets wheeled out from the after-hours drop every morning before we open, and my whole job for the first twenty minutes of a shift used to be, still is honestly, sorting it. Fiction goes one way, everything else fans out by call number, and there is a specific kind of person who returns fourteen items at once in no particular order and I have made peace with that person, I have to, they’re the reason I have a job.

What I didn’t expect, nine years in, is how much that sorting instinct has quietly taken over my house. My game closet used to be a genuine mess, boxes stacked by whatever fit, and at some point without really deciding to I started shelving them the way I shelve returns, by weight and use frequency instead of alphabetically, the stuff that comes off the shelf every week at eye level, the deep-cut stuff we play twice a year up top where it takes real effort to reach. Renata noticed before I did. She asked why Dominion had migrated down to the exact same shelf height as the picture books at work, and I didn’t have a good answer except that apparently my hands just do this now.

The thing is, a library shelf and a game shelf are solving genuinely different problems and I know that, intellectually. A library shelf has to be findable by a stranger who’s never been in the building before, that’s the whole job, universal legibility. A game shelf only has to make sense to the two or three people who actually open it, which means my system gets to be as weird and personal as I want, no call number has to survive contact with someone else’s logic. And yet here I am, running the same triage anyway, because apparently once your hands learn a sorting habit they don’t really ask your permission before applying it somewhere else.

I tried to explain this to a coworker once, that I’d basically colonized my own closet with public-library logic, and she just laughed and said half the staff do the same thing with their spice racks. Which, fair. I don’t think this is a library-specific disease so much as a general thing that happens when you spend enough hours a week putting one category of object in a specific order, your brain just starts seeing that order everywhere else too, whether it’s useful there or not.

I’m not going to stop doing it. The closet works better now, genuinely, I can find the two-player games without digging, and if that’s the return cart’s fault then I’ll take it. Some habits earn their keep even when they show up somewhere you didn’t invite them.