looking at pictures of the city at night makes my mouth taste like danger and my vision swim with the static feeling of the past. cigarette smoke makes my eyes water and clogs up my sinuses with hazy, half-formed memories of better days.
I’m leaving for college soon, and I’m leaving my dog behind. everyone says it’s for the best, but I still can’t help but feel a little bad. he’s a mean thing, jumpy and violent when provoked, and the only person he really likes is me.
I think, when he met me, he could smell the past on me. wafting off of me like the stink of a joint, filling him with understanding. I was the only person he would let put a collar on him. to this day, I have no idea why he tolerated it, why he didn’t bolt like he did with everyone else; perhaps he could smell the suffering I labored to keep underneath my skin. I wonder if it smelled like sex.
but, when I put the collar on him, my hands were gentle. and I coaxed him into believing others’ hands were gentle, too, and he let them put the collar on him, too.
lately, though, like he can sense a heaviness in the air, he presses his neck to the wall when I try to clip the thing on. not afraid but stubborn and rooted nonetheless. I have to force him into it, gently prying him toward me to loop the collar around his neck, and the action makes my mouth taste like cotton.
distantly, I wonder if this is how he felt when he saw me, freshly broken and full of hot rage and not enough tears to quell the hatred in my heart.
I kiss the top of my dog’s head and he noses at my chin and I wonder if this was how she felt when she first saw me, stare a thousand-miles long and mouth so stiff with cold that I could barely move it to speak. I hold my dog a little tighter. I wonder.
I wonder if I still smell like suffering, to him.
Five years later and I don't spend my days scrolling through the wet cityscapes that Pinterest shows me, anymore. Instead, I weave my fingers together like chain-links on a fence, and I hum to myself in the melody of the future.
My dog knows not to expect me for long. I come home in a flurry of chaos and excitement, and he spends a-month-and-change splayed out on my lap, warm and content, with my hand buried in his soft fur.
And I say, you want a walk? And he prances across the smooth wood floor to the door, wiggling, tongue lolling. He still flinches when I come at him with the leash a hair too fast; but with a soothing touch, and a calm word, the excitement at the prospect of a walk becomes far more important than his remembered fear.
He whines when I stay downstairs too long, and he yips when he wants me to play chase, and I laugh and I run until his old bones get worn out. And then we sit, breathing in tandem, and he presses his little face into the soft pouch of my stomach, and he hides from the world in the darkness of my safe embrace.
And it's funny. Because the smell of suffering and sex and fear must be so far away from all of this; my coarse hands are clean of blood, my own or otherwise. He gnaws playfully at my fingers like a puppy, and he is losing his teeth as he gets old, and he has no idea the kind of pain that used to be etched into my heartlines.
Or maybe he does, but it doesn't matter anymore; it's just me and him, and we are content, and there are no monsters here, not even in our dreams.
He still flinches when the doors slam and he barks when there are strangers in the house. And I still simper and smile when I shouldn't, and I still shake late into the night, not making eye contact with the shadows in the corners of my bedroom,
but mostly, I've forgotten what suffering smells like. Mostly, I sit with my face tilted towards the sun, and I remember that people are gentle.
