On (not) smelling home

Written on 22.12.2021

It smells different.

My home. Past tense.  

It is changed now.

Somehow it smells old. Feels old.

Sweet, bitter, nutty, sweaty, with-out-my-cat-ty.

It smells like soil.

Chairs in places convenient to reach.

Glasses changed to shapes easy to grab.

Carpets, tables and Christmas baubles of my and their parents’ home.

Everything looks different now.

A place I thought only grandparents could inhabit.

The smell of comfort, stale air.

The smell of exhaustion, and regret.

Like the place I once thought could never change, they have changed too.

A virus has kept me away for too long.

A tumour has made them change for good.

Clothes have changed their shape. They wear it different now.

At once more youthful, and more dated. Both, simultaneously.

Their faces, hands and bodies have become softer.
Where once freckles adorned their hard-working self-sacrificing hands, blue veins are now creeping to the front, deeper growing lines demarcating their skin.

Their faces begin to droop just like the house, becoming less precise and more comfortable, more forgiving with itself.

Now, I cannot smell them anymore.

I cannot communicate, I stutter.

What do I say to a person whose face I have ingrained in my very core, but the image has ceased to be there beyond myself.

Whose rough hands through all the cleaning, the working, the caring, I have touched a thousand times.

Whose red cheeks from all the laughter, worrying and internalized anger I have witnessed as long as I can remember.

I do not know these people. They seem to not know me anymore either.

I cannot speak. I can only stutter.

Search for familiarities. But I fail to see them.

All I have are those memories in my blood stream, my muscles, my lungs, my nose.

Who are these people? What is this place?

What a loss?

Or maybe. Not.

You see, we are all nomads.

Finding joy in discovering new people, new places, new smells.

Within this moment of halt, I prefer to rebuild a home.