Earth, that grit of soil and dirt under your fingernails, exists to remind you of where you're going. Not out in flames, running down the hall chasing the man with a fire extinguisher. But quietly, in the night, with your grandchildren all watching peacefully as they cover your face with a pillow your spouse found at a garage sale.
The choking blackness, the suffocating corral of your loved ones unloving you from this mortal coil. It's a thumping ophthalmic headache as your arms reach out and flail all too late. Your last breath filled with chunks of dust, skin flakes and that smell that only exists in other people's homes.
Why is that? What kind of things are going on in other people's homes that they generate their own stink signature? Whatever it is, it brings back those memories of coming home after a day away and realising your home reeked of its own thumbprint. One that disappeared up your nose and into your brain after a half hour, like it was never there.
Do you smell like that too? When people look at you and have their elbow pits up to their mouths and noses, is that what they're reacting to? Eventually they all start looking like that that your ears tune into how they speak through muffles and watering eyes. As if they wished you were never there.
Like how you were never really there at Ruby Ridge, but all those newspapers, bloody clothes and VHS tapes made it feel like some kind of excursion. The events that unfolded were not sympatico with anything you knew before, but it was something to witness, or at least witness after the fact after moving in after the estate sale. That's the ultimate garage sale haul.
All your kids and grandkids, keeping their eyes on that fellow in a suit and that briefcase, waiting to hear how the next version of your will would fall for them. Vultures. Turns out to not be such a bad investment after all. Hopefully that struggling actor will realise his dreams of being a line cook.
Written on Friday, 21 March 2014