The Compound

The terrible smells that radiated from that house were more than anyone could expect you to tolerate, but we did because we had too. The floor was peeling up at the edges. Empty beer bottles masquraded as knick-knacks. The melencholy plants held on to the slightest hint of green, only striving for attention, desperately, much like the characters surrounding them. I always wished I could help, but I never really did anything but add to the horrendous mess surrounding me. A few days short of a week, I began to blend into the scenery, but that was only expected.
I fumbled for my keys, early in the morning, and some guy said something like, “It’s about time you left.” I left the comment unnoticed, because it was true in more ways than one. Four days spent in the mist of this debacle and I was beginning to smell as bad as the interior, not to mention I felt like I too had begun to rot away like the wood beneath my feet. Of course, he meant it in a different way. He had to mean it in a different way, because the kids around here seemed to not mind the smell, or the visual torments, it almost seemed like they preferred it. I smiled quick at the guy pretending to be sleeping on the floor, and left with nothing I came with.
This hour drive seemed weak today. Typically filled with so much thought, today it laid in front of me with little or no controversy, except for that which reamined in my head. I quietly counted the lines in the road with teeth clentched together, and eyes opened wide.
I crawled underneath my white down comforter and wondered why it was that four days of waste has such an impact on a person. It wasn’t the waste around me when I was there that bothered me, it was the waste I felt inside my soul as I was driving away. It was the taint that turned my skin pale tones of yellow and white, that made every pore on my face glow pink to the right kind of eyes. It was the lingering feeling of defeat, and the feeling of dejection I exhumed when I stayed there for a few days.
They didn’t understand, I thought, “but I don’t understand either.” I said aloud, with only my ears as witness.
I tried to sleep for hours, warm and cold, hot and sweaty, my heart pounding in my ears, each blood cell being felt as it surged through my veins; of course I couldn’t sleep. I never could sleep after such a adventure, such an endeavor. I could feel the follicles of hair on my scalp twisting and growing. My muscles remained tight and twitching as my toes pointed on end. I sat up in bed and stretched, sniffed hard, and felt a dry burning mucus substance slide down the back of my throat. I gagged, of course, and feared the worst; That I’d forever be dirty inside, and the rejection I felt for being there for four days was filling my soul like rain to a shallow grave.
I sat on my floor cross legged, and concentrating hard on meditation. I tried to cast my heart to a far away place, vacant from hurt, smell, or filth. I sat there lost in a clean pristine sanctuary away from comments of addiction and hatred. I tried to regress to a time where none of this mattered, a glitch in my life where I believed that everything would be okay, and everything always works out for the best. My age has robbed me of those beliefs and my eyes have outlived every last glowing ember of hope or faith, and my soul, like the leaves of the dead plants at the compound, held on to the slightest hint of life, striving desperately only for attention.