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I close my eyes and inhale the scent, relishing in the sweetly tart smell. It’s something I do every time my nose encounters a pleasing aroma.
I savor.
And I ruminate.
And I am thankful for such a smell.
I sniff again, deeply, because it helps to drive the smell of incarceration out of my memory. For five years, I smelled the inside of a prison. It’s a distinctive odor that I never got used to… a combination of toilets overflowing with shit, sweaty armpits, with just a hint of bleach underneath. The bleach was used to scrub away the shit, or even sometimes bloodstains from the floor, but it never really eradicated the underlying stench. The gritty lump of soap we were given certainly did nothing to erase away the sweat and grime of prison life.
“Hey man… give me a hand here?”
I open my eyes and see Hunter struggling with three boxes, which he’s stacked one on top of the other, the top one getting ready to slide off. Within three strides, my long legs eat up the distance. I grab the top package before it can topple over.
“Where do these go?”
“My bathroom,” Hunter says. “I’m almost afraid of the fact that Gabby has three boxes of shit to put in the bathroom. ”
“I heard that,” Gabby grumbles as she comes in, carrying a DVD player that she sets on the living room floor near the TV.
Walking up to me, she takes the box from my hands. “Do me a favor, Brody? Will you switch out my DVD player for Hunter’s? Mine’s Blu-ray, and I want to bring him into the twenty-first century. I’ll just head to the bathroom to put away my three boxes of shit, as Hunter so fondly called them. ”
Shaking his head with a smirk on his face, Hunter follows Gabby back to the bedroom. I smile internally, truly happy for them. I know I wanted him to leave her behind so he could have another shot at getting back on the ASP World Tour, but I have to trust that my brother knows what’s best for himself. I’d never give up something that important for a woman, but to each his own.
I turn toward the DVD player to swap it out. Sitting down on the floor, I pick up Gabby’s unit and examine it. Blu-rays had come out a few years before I started my incarceration, but I never had one. It wasn’t something I could afford as a struggling med student at Duke. Still, it looks simple enough. There’s an HDMI cable hooked up to the back of it already, and after getting to my knees so I can peer around the back of Hunter’s TV, I see there’s a corresponding plug for the other end.
Within two minutes, I have Gabby’s Blu-ray hooked up, and I start to head back out to her truck for another load. As I walk by the mantel, a photograph catches my eye. Reaching out, I take the frame down so I can see it more clearly.
It’s of Hunter and me… taken the summer before I got arrested. It’s out at Cape Hatteras, I believe, and Hunter had been in for a quick visit. We decided to head out and catch some waves, even though that was what Hunter did for a living. He was always happiest in the water, so that’s where we hung. I sort of remember this day and, if I’m not mistaken, Casey had been out there with us and took the photo.
Hunter and I are happy and relaxed, our arms slung around each other’s shoulders and our free hands giving the “Hang Ten” sign. His hair is still the same today as it was then… medium length and with choppy layers… light brown with streaks of gold from the sun. Mine back then was much shorter than his was, but the coloring was the same. After a few weeks in the hot Carolina sun for my summer break, my hair had lightened up pretty quickly.
We were the best of friends, but I think that’s natural for identical twins. Our bond boiled down genetically to matching strands of DNA, but it was fortified by the fact that Hunter and I had a pretty deep mental connection.
Always had growing up, sometimes even knowing if the other was sick or in pain.
Not kidding.
As I look at this photo, I start to feel a twinge of something inside my chest. Like an ache or a hollowness. Maybe I’d even call it a yearning. It’s the same feeling I had when I first went to prison… when I was aching for my family… for my life. But that ache eventually went away, and I didn’t think on it too much. Over time, I started slowly shutting those things I missed away in a little compartment… and then I buried it deep. I found it made the pain go away and let me focus on my new life as a felon.
I’m the first to admit… my family never let me try to lock them away for good. Mom and Dad came to visit me often, as did Casey. Hunter came when he could while on tour and, in between visits, they all wrote to me frequently. I tried to write back, but honestly… what would I tell them?
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