Little solace comes
to those who grieve
when thoughts keep drifting
as walls keep shifting
and this great blue world of ours
seems a house of leaves

moments before the wind.
House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski

I wonder if you’ve ever noticed: hospitals have a certain smell. Not cat piss, rotting potatoes, skunk-clawed garbage bag sweltering in the summer sun sort of stench. It’s more nostalgic, I think; something like, here is a body and now here is not a body, sort of scent.

(And I don’t mean dead body smell.)

But that’s not really it either.

It’s nothing definable. There is no absoluteness. No Smell (mind the capital “s”). It’s just there. Weaving in and through the air like some beach seagull looking for a place to take a dump.

(I also don’t mean shit-smell either, although I’m sure you could sniff that one out if you tried.)

One minute it’s an everyday sort of smell – something you expect (like, if you’re by the water, you anticipate the tang of salt, or fish, or sand) – and the next, splat! It hits you.

A “what the fuck is that,” but more subtle.

It’s an odor of silence echoing down the hallways. The sound of people sitting there. Lining the walls. Flipping through year-old magazines; watching infomercials about Oxyclean or Alli or Proactive; resting their eyes.

Waiting. For an hour or two. For 26 hours. 34. 48.

For even longer, sometimes, but in shorter increments (say, for example, your significant other’s…mother…has/d stomach cancer and gets a (the most dangerous) (Whipple) procedure (they remove 1/3 of her stomach, 1/3 of her liver, 1/3 of her intestines – pretty much 1/3 of everything inside her), and you’re waiting to see if:

• 1. she makes it through the 13-hour surgery
  2. her body accepts or rejects the newly reduced parts two to four days later
  3. the nurses remember to check her stitches for infection
     1. so that she doesn’t end up “going septic” (the infection gets into a person’s bloodstream and proceeds to shut off every organ in the body) six days later.

Killing time, is all.

Not casually or thoughtlessly (like, you had a long day at work and you just feel like “coming home and relaxing this evening”), but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. You do or do not do work, you do or do not read, you do or do not daydream. If you sleep, it is not because you need sleep.

You choose to count those sheep; to cut time in half.

That smell – it’s the smell of carnage. Hospital time is just one big mass murder.

It’s nostalgic because once you step foot inside, you’re instantly guilty. We’ve all got blood on our hands.