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The smell of your parent’s house, a smell that brings tears to your eyes whenever you smelled it, so strong, so sweet, like the outside air and the sweat of seven and your mother’s laugh, how you can hear it from anywhere in the house and sometimes you can’t tell if it’s really a laugh or maybe a cry, and how this is the safest place on earth, and that if a nuclear bomb exploded you would want to be here, just here, smelling that smell and so you sit on your stairs and it’s so hot you start sweating behind your ears, a place you never knew could ever sweat and if you listen really closely you can hear your brother shift in his sleep, and your father breathe, so loud it sounds like snores, but really you know that he sucks in half the world with each breath, and you think that he’s trying to figure it out, even when he’s sleeping, and you can feel your sister’s itch, her skin beneath her blanket, like spaghetti sauce on pasta, red spread through the white in chunks, and you shift and the stairs creak, like when you were little and you would sneak down in the middle of the night to get a drink of water and you tried to be quiet, quiet, but now you are 20 years old and you don’t have to sneak any longer and this smell, this smell, like a magnet, pulling you always closer to it, expecting you to stay and stick, it repulses you somehow because you know you don’t belong, really, any longer, but you are sitting on the stairs in your in between time, where you can still feel the pull, in your back and your gut and your fingers and especially your toes, how they refuse to carry you very far away in this summer and you wonder when you will forget this smell, when this smell will cease to exist all together, when you will be immune, if you will be immune and you wish then that we still lived in caves, all together, for as many forever’s as it took to stop this feeling, the feeling you get whenever you leave - how getting in an airplane still feels like getting lost in the grocery store and the people in the plane are the vegetables, looking at you baldly, and they can never replace this perfect safety and you breathe in this smell, still, because you still can, for awhile yet, and the tears are escaping from your eyes so fast now