Ash & Worms

Weeds

My memories are all centered around smells, not visions of the past that I'd like to recall or wish to repress. I'm entirely comfortable with the past, though it has the tendency of making me afraid of myself. My past smells like the sudden rain that comes midsummer. It smells like the worms that wash to the surface to be sprinkled over my sidewalk of the past. My past smells humid and hot where it burns my nostrils just to leave soot clouding my lungs traveling up to press itself behind the surface of my face. There's a furnace of fire resting behind the hollows of my cheeks, crackling and blazing. Burning warmth that screams directly above the 2nd maxillary molars of either side of my face respectively. It's a certain burn that harvests some sort of, almost, imaginary sting due to it being so specific. Is it real? I could ask myself that question every day and night alike until I drew myself closer and closer, by the throat, into insanity.

I've chortled.

I've seen insanity defined as doing the same things the exact same way and hoping for change, though I'm 100-percent sure that was some authors' creative and poetic way of putting it. Is that why serial killers are classified as insane? Routines. They all have routines, it seems, that they have to accomplish to get that release that comes with taking a life. They have motives too, no matter how twisted their reasoning. Some want to clear the whores of this world from the streets but as they kill one another appears in her place. Some have these thoughts that they deem wrong, after growing up in an anti-LGBT environment, and when the innate desire takes over they respond in backlash toward someone who was comfortable as themselves as compensation for their own uncomfortableness.

Scientists have been trying to see if being a killer is a predisposition for a while now. Is it possible that killers are born? Are they made? Can we physically see that someone is prone to killing by the way their brain is shaped or how underdeveloped the areas of the brain that deal with impulse control are? Some children display specific tendencies at a young age such as killing small animals. This is why scientists believe they can, without a doubt, define insanity in with science. What is insanity though? Nothing is definitive because sanity to some is insanity to others. Some people see nothing wrong.

Insanity.

My own form of insanity is the pitter-patter of keys on a keyboard, writing line after line only to come back to a blank screen. I hit the backspace key twice as often as I hit the spacebar and my thoughts flow sloppily butchered. I write to give warning and I can't even describe the heat the suffocates me from my fireplace two rooms over. The air so thick I can nearly feel it on my fingers, slithering and congealing my thoughts that travel to my hands. The smell is of my brother that dances around my nostrils and threatens to lull me with a gentle song. The smell of ash and damp soil laced with worms.

Surely I hadn't dozed off but then again it wouldn't be unexpected if I had. I didn't want to sleep nowadays with the thoughts that plagued me. I rubbed my face trying to spark some sort of wakefulness into my exhausted soul as I sat up in my chair, leaning back to crack the T-4 to T-7 vertebrae in the thoracic spine. There was a distinct smell of ash coupled with the feeling of relief that comes after a thunderstorm. When the sleepiness was blinked from my eyes I felt like I could vaguely see ash covering everything in a weightless blanket. Though it wasn't real, the world seemed scorched and dry to my imagination but the scent was overpowering to the point of nausea.

How my memories loved the smell of worms.

When I was younger my brother and I used to go outside and spend hours upon hours in our backyard. We'd find small creatures such as toads and tiny rodents that we'd catch and carry back to our mother and father like cats bringing gifts to their master however I seemed to kept mine alive. My mother would describe it as a child-like ignorance and that he, my identical, would grow out of it. I understood that a young age he had the full intention of being gentle. I recall the frustration in his face as his small, meaty toddler hands held what his anger had crushed. I remember the elephant tears he would cry as he was scolded by my father. I remember the elephant tears he cried to me when he held his shackled hands up to me, pleading for my forgiveness like he was bestowing a gift. I could smell the dampness of mud caked under his nails even though I made sure to keep away from the creature standing in front of me. I wasn't surprised when it happened. I wanted to be surprised but I had suspected it.

I laughed in his face.

Insanity to my brother was trying to love and snapping when it got frustrating. He lacked impulse control and his anger raged like a fire to only be scorched out by storm. Calm never came after the storm for him. There was only moments of silence after the thunder that preceded the next strike of lightning where worms laid motionless on the sidewalk. These were the summer rains that wetted the scorched lands and allowed mothers to grieve over the flowers they once cherished. This was the summer that my mother would grieve over the flower I had once called my brother. He hadn't wilted and died away like the others though, he had been uprooted and planted far away with the other deceptively concealed weeds.