Under my bed there is a shoebox. There's nothing special inside it, not to anyone who doesn't know. There are a few old photographs, brown with age, a couple on their wedding day. There is a small vial of bleach, tightly sealed so none can spill. There's a little can of air spray. And dozens and dozens of sweet wrappers. Anyone who looked inside this would think I was weird. They don't know. It's the closest I can come to the smell when I'm away.
It's the smell I want. Every second that I'm in that place it clings to me, latching a ride on my clothes. It seeps into my skin, it pervades my hair, mingling with my own scent until the smell seems to come solely from me when I'm not there.
I used to detest it. The feel of it along my skin and in my nostrils would make my flesh crawl, and I would head for the shower the second I got home, the hot jets of water blasting onto my naked body like a cleansing ritual. I would scrub at my skin until it lay broiled pink beneath my unrelenting touch, trying to clean away the smell and take with it the memories I didn't want to remember anymore.
I hated that smell. Every single time it would remind me of the past, a past I could never again touch, taste, smell. I could only catch cruel glimpses of the life I craved. It served only as torture to me. It rubbed into my face, right down to the very pores of my skin, the unpalatable truth, like little grains of sand, rough-edged and hard. I could never bring them back. My dearest wish, my heart's desire, would never come to fruition. For me, it's over.
Now, it's different. I don't scrub the smell away anymore. Now, it is I who cling to the smell. I crave it. I delay my shower as long as I possibly can, until I am forced, literally, to climb under the scalding water. I don't want to wash it away anymore. No one knows. I couldn't stand it if anyone did. It's already difficult for me at school, without everyone knowing about this too.
It's not that I'm ashamed. It's not that I'm afraid of people reacting badly to me, ostracising me. It's that I know the people I care about, the people whose opinions mean anything to me, will look at me with pity in their eyes and compassion in their hearts, and I couldn't bear that. So no one knows, and even if anyone did, I doubt they'd understand.
I don't blame them. It's hard to know until you've lost someone how things will affect you. Most of them have lost people, but not in the same way that I have. I lose them every single day. I lose them every time I visit that place. What no one would understand is that I crave the smell because every time I breathe it in it brings me closer to them. Every time I inhale the scent of it, it takes me to where they are. For me, that's all I will ever have. And that's enough. I've had to content myself with it. Dreaming of an impossible wish only made me miserable. Limiting my imagination makes it easier somehow.
The smell isn't anything particularly pleasant. It smells of cleaning fluids - bleach and detergent. It smells of air freshener and the starch from the sheets. It smells of Droople's Best Blowing Gum. Every time I have to wash it away it feels like I'm washing them away too.
Every time I have to leave them it breaks my heart a little. Especially my mother. She looks so young in her hospital gown and yet so old. Her hair is wispy and white now, her face a shrunken shell, but her eyes are still young-looking. She never smiles. Not anymore. In all the photographs I have of her, she's always smiling.
My father is the same. He never speaks. He barely moves. He just sits there listlessly all day, staring at the same spot on the wall. He doesn't notice when his hair is sticking up or his clothing is rumpled. He doesn't resemble the immaculately dressed man in the photos. His eyes aren't full of laughter anymore. The laughter died several years ago.
They don't recognise me. That's the hardest part. The people who gave me life don't know who I am. And yet they don't have life either, not anymore. They don't live. They exist. They don't even know where they are. Or who they are.
Sometimes I read about the people their tormentors affected. The people whose torture led to their deaths. And sometimes, just sometimes, I wish my parents had been among those lucky ones. That's an awful thing to say. But the truth is, they're already dead. They died many years ago. But their bodies refused to die with them.
(I felt like writing something new as I've not really written anything in bloody AGES, and the scene from Order of the Phoenix in which Neville visits his parents makes me tearful every time I read it. I just want to take Neville and hug him, and make his parents well again. This was originally going to be his POV of that scene, but it ended up just being a kind of soliloquy about his feelings for his parents. Let me know what you think.)