My great grandpa semi-recently died, and so me and my parents moved into his condo to stay in until we moved from Nevada to New Jersey. He lived on a second story so he had a balcony to hang out on, and I liked to sit on it late at night. I would listen to music and drink, and it helped with everything that was going on. Because we lived in Nevada, somewhere in the distance there were mountains, which were usually too dark to see at night until it became around 4 am, when the sun would start coming up and you could just barely see them.
Last night I went out to do the usual, hang out on the balcony and listen to music. And that’s when I saw a smiley face in the distance. Right as I was about to open the glass door, I saw it. From the mountain, not like there was someone on there who was smiling, it was as if the mountain itself had a smiley face. A bright white smiley face. I opened the door and it was gone, I decided to ignore it because it was 3 am I could very well be tired, but I couldn’t sleep either.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the face though, what was it? If it wasn’t a hallucination, what could it possibly have been? I kept listening to the music, trying to ignore it. Letting the voices of artists like Rivers, Kurt Cobain take me away.
And then one song in particular came up. Promise, by Akira Otoishi. This song sticks out to me because much like the protagonist of the game that it’s in, I lost a loved one to an illness, the only difference being that I didn’t smother him and it was my grandpa. I’m not as emotional about dead relatives, or at least my grandpa like most people would be but I still did love him. He wasn’t the best man and he had his downs but I still had memories with him and loved him. If I had the chance I would bring him back if I could.
Now for context for this next part, my grandpa played piano, he had a piano in his living room and he loved to make music, though it was usually Christian or Mormon music since he was religious. So it creeped me out even more than it would normally when I heard a piano playing while I was out on the balcony. Just outside of my earbuds, the sound of Fur Elise playing. That was when I decided to go back inside, and luckily I did before it started raining. I love the rain so I decided to look out my window once I got back to my room. And I once again saw the smiley on the mountain, and this time it was followed by the smell of death. Like a dead body. Like if the grim reaper had a wax burner. Even though it was raining, my window had one of those Nets outside the actual glass part of the window. So I decided to open the window for a moment to get the smell out while I tried to figure out what the smiley face was. But as soon as I opened the window the face was gone, that’s when I decided to test something. I opened and closed the window again, and when the window was closed that’s the only time I saw the smiley face. I was only able to see in the glass, and then it hit me like a ton of bricks, what the smell was. Or more importantly, what the face was.