A Wandering Caravan - Kalon Development Event

Tali inhales, and the scent of the flowers is overwhelming but the underlying cinnamon that she swears she smells is even stronger.

"I know that it's common, but cinnamon reminds me of my mother. She always had cinnamon sticks laying around the house, along with dried oranges. She'd hang them on doorways and arches and said that it helped keep the bad things away.

She kept a lot of little things around the house. Trinkets, and plants, and decorative vases. There were keys hidden behind paintings, and they opened the basement, the cellar, the attic, the safe. She had bowls of crushed lavender in our bedrooms to help us sleep, and she had clear quartz towers on the headboards of our beds to asborb our nightmares and the worries that kept us awake. I really loved it, and it was always so weird going over to a friend's house." She laughs.

"I had a friend who's dads kept the house really minimalistic. Neutral tones, no trinkets or knickknacks. Maybe, if you were lucky, there was a tall but thin plant hiding in the corner of the room. I couldn't stand being there. There was nothing to look at, nothing to do. It was just so... so boring. So plain.

When my mom got sick, got really, really sick, they moved her to a room in the hospital. Everything was so... clean. So white, and sterile, maybe with some touches of blue if you were lucky. Everything was put in cabinets. There was nothing to look at. There was nothing to do. We tried to hang up some plants and cinnamon sticks once, and they told us we couldn't do that. I can't imagine dying there.

And I guess sometimes, I kind of wonder if her illness killed her or if her boredom did. She must have been out of her mind, constantly dissociating, with nothing to do, nothing to look at. I left a box of wax to melt there on accident once and when I came back to visit her again, she had anchored herself to it. She told me in detail about how they smelled, and looked, and felt, using words that I had never heard her use before. I still haven't melted them. I just keep them in a box under my couch.

I'm... sorry. I didn't mean to ramble to you. Thanks for listening, and have a good day."