There are some messes in life that you can’t get rid of no matter how much you clean.
The worst of these of course are memories.
A simple smell can bring you back to the best and worst moments of your life.
Sure, you can clean your domain or your workplace, but you can’t clean the world.
No matter how hard you try.
I’ve spent countless days and nights trying to forget that awful sight of my people massacred because of a simple command by Ares.
Most of the time it’s ok, I block it out of my mind like so many other things but a simple sniff of smoke from the most innocent of places like a restaurant teleports me right back there.
The smoke that perforated my nostrils makes me fall to my knees in agony and regret.
I don’t even cook anymore. That old pastime has been ruined forever. I can’t control the outside world but I can at least control my own private domicile.
That doesn’t mean the nightmares stop, that I am not in a prison of my own mind.
A simple smell shouldn’t break me but that’s simple human psychology.
The littlest things are often the ones that tear us down.
Why do I bring this up?
Once I got this double feature championship back, I instantly got sent back to the first time I won this and vowed to myself its going to be different this time.
Then I started smelling things I couldn’t put a finger on.
The thing that proved to me this is already different.
The first time I won it, it was brand new, cleaner than it will ever be again.
It had never been with anyone before.
It clung to me tight and we were bonded at the hip.
All I could smell was clean leather.
Now when I lift it, I sniff the multiple smells from all who have touched it since.
The most clear was from the last person who had it.
Musty and old like a grandparents’ attic, Lamplight’s antiques made it smell like them.
Beneath that were other scents buried under antique nostalgia.
Perfume that simultaneously gave hints of flowers and darkness.
An iron and bait smell that only a hunter can give.
A smell of sadness only a burning bitch can provide.
Rotten putridity that only a cannibal has on their teeth.
Underneath this disgusting range was a smell that is intertwined with the leather itself, me, the one it won’t ever let go, it’s first, the one that got away.
If you somehow take it from me and scrub and spray all those other people from it’s past, you’ll never stop noticing my smell, noticing how it’s still attached to me, noticing why it came back to me, knowing it’s only a matter of time before it’s mine again.
We both know you can’t stand the idea of filth and nothing is dirtier than a past so skip the pain.
Let it stay in the arms of someone who loves it despite our time apart, not someone who’s going to try and change it the moment they get together.