November Scaries in anticlimatic

I can’t shake the creeps.

They come in a variety of forms; a handful of concepts. Memories seem further away than they aught to be. Or maybe they just felt closer than they should have up until now. The difference in the worlds that my memories take place in, compared to today, and often to one another- is now so vast that things I know happened seem almost irreconcilable with reality. It’s psychosis inducing, in a way.

I keep smelling my grandmas basement. This combination of moth balls, yellow linoleum, and camel wides. That house is sold, and probably smells different by now anyway. How did we let that happen? When someone dies, you don’t really think about what to do with their house. It’s as easy to forget that the house lingers after the human perishes as it is that the human perishes at all. Suddenly you are confronted with a void where a major character in your life used to be, and also suddenly a house with no keeper or purpose. We sell the house in the shock of it all, because who else is going to want this place whose entire sea of meaning just abruptly had its subscription canceled? So, someone else collects the ruins of a person’s life by way of their old house, and takes it from there.

I bought my house from an old lady four years ago. Last 4th of July a stranger walked into my kitchen like he had done it a hundred times and asked where Judy was. I told him she sold the house to me and his face dropped- not just because he felt bad for walking in on me, but because like me he could still smell the basement of someone’s grandma’s house in his memory, but that house was someone else’s now and off limits to the warm holiday nostalgia that used to live in that scent.

In my 20s I made a bunch of friends, and then mostly stopped. Since then, it’s been a slow progression of watching them change into different people. Many are gone at this point. One of my oldest recently survived a heart attack. Another has been in the wind for two years now running from a parole violation and warrant. Many are sick. A few are very sick, and counting each day. At least half are completely insane, with thin shells of their former selves. Some are OK. Some are hanging in there. But the overall trend is grim, and I find it all very unsettling during the second half of November.