Smells like carpet

It seems like there were years of just laying there, thinking a deep river of thought but not really thinking at all. Not figuring anything out, not adding or subtracting, not remembering what someone said. After breakfast, feeling guilty that breakfast ended at eleven in the morning, although not really having any reason to move faster, to go anywhere, to accomplish anything, going back upstairs to lay back down, or lay on the floor with a My Little Pony and contemplate it. And smell its Carmex-y smell. Some say Carmex is addictive - I can at least confirm that I was addicted to its scent in my plastic toys. Like a new baby doll the first couple of months after Christmas. The less there was that had to happen, the more my life was filled with these little senses like that smell, or the motion of a leaf in the sun. Or the weight of a wheelbarrow with a brother in it.
There were also the chunks of time that seem to be filled with the mall, with all the malls that we lived near. If any concerned adult asked us, why aren't you in school? we knew to answer that our school was out that day. We only wanted to go to Sears to play their greasy-handled video games until our eyes were dry and red and we were inexplicably grumpy. We had long learned how to outsmart marketing tactics such as this. If we played the games and then didn't ask for them to be bought for us, we won. If we went around and around the food court, filling up on free samples on toothpicks, we won then too. Before the free video games I entertained myself by crawling around on the department store carpet (which all smells the same) finding random little treasures of buttons, loose change, multi-colored threads, packing peanuts, those swervy little plastic hooks that go on socks to hang them on a display. When we got too old for this and had thoroughly exhausted the video game repertiore, we perused Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield, and Jay Leno's headlines in Waldenbooks for hours on end. While I guess my mother was shopping, although looking back it was probably just a way to get rid of us all for a few hours. She never met us when she said, but we never had the nerve to show up late to the meeting point. Sometimes I'd sit in the echo-y non-place between the inside doors and the outside doors of a department store, with the square brown tiled floors and the mirrors at both ends, trying to keep my brothers from attracting attention by beating the hell out of each other, and get really mad about it all.
After a few years of filling our time thusly, I started to get sick every time we went to a mall. All we had to do was walk in the door and I would just double over with pain in the pit of my stomach that I couldn't explain. I once had a pair of shoes that were a size and a half too big because I had said they fit great, just to get out of the store. It took a long time before we made the connection with malls, but it was unwaveringly consistent. I stopped going pretty soon after that and just stayed home.
On days like today, grey, empty, not filled with working or errands or little jobs to do, I feel that panicky feeling creeping back up like it used to. Feeling guilty for not having anything to do. For being content to curl up and watch the plants grow, a skill honed over endless empty mornings and afternoons.

The End.