Message number seven
Volume one
Where am I?
Sometimes when I'm in a room, it will remind me through a smell or something of a room I've been in before
Sometimes the smell could be camphor, or vanilla, or whatever it is smell they put in gas so that you'll be able to detect if there's a leak
And suddenly, I'll be transformed to that other place and usually it's a room I had as a child in which I had a terrible fever once
And the entire room was transformed in my imagination or in my feverous hallucination
Into a place of screaming white faces looking at me
It was interesting and disconcerting at the same time
It was around then that I first began having the dream where I was a child at the bottom of the sea
And there, my sea uncles and I think maybe they were really turtles, introduced me to a robot who was apparently my brother
My robot brother under the ocean
I thought about him for many years
I believe he had a red head and a yellow body
Kinda now I'm thinking like Iron Man
But this, I hadn't heard of Iron Man at the time
And then we would travel places
Years later, I found out I had a brother that I didn't know about
My father had had another son
And he wasn't a robot
But to me he was, 'cause that's what like having a half-brother is sometimes
I think the meaning of the dream, and the whole meaning of the fever was this and not about a real brother at all
But to know yourself in such a way that that hidden robot brother in you, again introduced to you by your underwater uncles, can help you come to peace with things
That's why other smells don't take me places
Like most of the bad ones, rotten meat which I remember smelling on a ship one time
You have to store food on a ship, you see
If you're going out to sea, you can't just expect to go shopping
You have to bring along what you're going to eat, so if you bring along something that's too fresh, it's gonna go bad
And that's a rule in life as well
Make sure things are dried up or put away in tins
Can last you, even if you have malaria and get a fever, and start seeing things that aren't there
But they can be good company too
Not everything that isn't there isn't real
Like this room
Not this room, but the room I'm in as a child and I'm brought back to by the gas smells and the camphor and other things like I said
Maybe it was cookies or something that my grandmother was baking
'Cause she would, and she'd infect these places in my mind with the molecules imprinting
And now I can't shake it
And so maybe if I smell you and your coat's been in one of those closets with mothballs, I'm back there again
Oh, it's tiresome
I wanna go on and live another life outside this cycle of my memories but I cannot, I'm trapped inside them
It's a little spiral, and I think as I die and I remember them more opaquely, and I become more like a memory movie, that it's gonna be even more interesting
"What's this part?!"
Everything will be a surprise as the movie in my mind unwinds
And it'll remind me of things
And I'll take little naps
And it won't be so bad
And that room, it is a ship
It was a ship all along!
And that's probably why I smelled gas
But now looking back, I don't know, would I trade it for being on solid land?
Yes, I would
That's the funny part
Where am I?
Message seven, volume one
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The "Where Am I" network
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