cleaning high as a rehearsal for surviving alone — "the little whimpers and anxious moans…"

The compulsion's origin, and the anxiety it was medicating: cleaning high was a rehearsal of the solitude she was already bracing for, a visualization of the immaculate space she could keep if the relationship collapsed. The steely-independence fantasy is undercut in the same breath by the whimpers and moans leaking out of her as she scrubbed — the dread the ritual was built to manage audible right through the ritual.