Scent, the Persistence of Choice

Scent is the biggest liar of all the senses. Does danger smell repugnant? Does a bad person smell bad? Not that bad people aren't sometimes attractive, and vice versa, but eventually it's still visible. In the eyes. In the twist of the lips.

The smell of someone's hair, their skin, their breath. the grass outside the house; none of these tell you you're in the wrong place, a terrible place, a place so bad you won't even know how fully it has wrecked you for years. In fact, they seem to conspire to tell you otherwise. "Stay," they say, intoxicating. And you do.

I wonder if her hair would have smelled familiar, all those long years later. Her skin. Would it have changed due to age, due to products they didn't make back then or which at any length she didn't use? Would the overwhelming scent of trees and flowers and grass which surely swelled around her on that day allow her own, personal scent to come through? Would the blood caked to what was left of her skull drown out those subtleties in harsh iron musk? Does it smell like smoke, or seared flesh, when someone blows their head off? I don't know, I've never been around it.

I didn't even realize it bothered me - how crazy that sounds now. Later I thought I'd just been in denial, just failed to process it, so I set about processing it. But I failed even then. I am not over it. I am haunted. I experience things I thought strictly for the movies. I quiver, shake, my crying is punctuated by wide-eyed gasping at the horror beneath it. It is intimate, real. This is how it happens, how the void crawls into our skulls. It leers at us from unanswered questions, from pangs born in well-worded fiction or real, personal loss. But still it keeps its distance. Still it is somehow remote - and we know it. Even if we don't know it at the time. Because later, when it has found its one place of entry, that single weak spot on which it turns torrent, rushes in to fill us with its darkness, then we certainly know.

The horror of her death is a counterpoint to the horror of my life. Modesty, as well as obvious, foundational distinctions, guarantee I see them as truly different. And yet both are horrors. And that's the point. Even the most distant, different things are eventually the same.

But only half the horror, half the haunting, is because she is gone, inexplicably and tragically. The other half is much more insidious. The truth of it is like a slow whisper from hell. It echoes in the wind, reverberates in the creaks of floorboards, insinuating itself subtlety, slowly. It is the presentation of an option, and the proof that it delivers.

I am haunted by her death and I am haunted by my life and they are so different - and yet not. So the whisper kicks up. The darkness fills my skull, floods it full until I begin to look for a way, any way, to vent it. The whisper rises on the wind, makes its dark promises, and I start to listen. It's beginning to be so I can't hear anything else.