ECSTASY

42

Ever since you left, staying in your old room has been torturous. 

The smell hits first, a sweet mustiness that envelops the room. Then comes the attempt to identify it. Where does it come from exactly? Why do I pause? You sniff the books, the sheets, the furniture. You realize it's coming from the candles you never lit. 

Next is the onslaught of memories. You have to hold a nearby desk to steady yourself as the nameless feelings pass over you like waves crashing and receding. These memories are more like peculiar feelings trapped in time and reanimated by the smell of the candles with no context to go along with them. They are meaningless and yet you want to cry. 

You cry because before you left this room all these smells and memories made sense, they fit together in a carefully woven tapestry in the mind and when you left you took a single piece of thread and pulled it out, leaving the rest in an untangled, unintelligible mess. 

You cry because this room which once felt like a piece of your heart, a sanctuary, an embodied expression of your life, has mummified into the realm of the past, only accessible and belonging to someone who no longer exists, and it was you yourself who made it so. 

That is why you cry.