I woke up the next morning to a pleasant, sweet smell filling the house. As I faded out of sleep, I became aware of an odd sensation - my right cheek pressed against my pillow, my pillow damp.
I sat up, perplexed, and felt drool drip out of my mouth. Gross. That hadn't happened in a while. It happened on occasion - like many many months apart... but.
No. This has nothing to do with... that, I told myself.
I sniffed at the air. Syrup. And that meant pancakes. I pushed myself up out of bed and walked downstairs.
"Well you're up early," my mom said as I walked into the kitchen.
"I was awakened by the smell of pancakes."
My mom laughed, stirring a small pot. "Really? I've started working on the syrup, but you'll have to wait a bit for the pancakes. I'm surprised you smelled that so easily."
I sniffed at the air. "It smells really strong though."
She looked at me thoughtfully. "I didn't think my sense of smell was that good, but you are leaps and bounds ahead of me."
I shrugged, and went into the living room, turning on the screen to some news. I sniffed the air again as I listened to it idly. I was smelling things more strongly. I could smell the fabric in the couches. I could smell the disinfectant from a freshly wiped windowsill, and the faint trace of the half eaten popsicle that Ashley had left melting there a day before.
It was... weird. As I kept sniffing at the air, I felt all these different smells permeating my reality. It was like when my parents found out that my vision was near-sighted when I was little, and we'd gone to get my vision corrected. It was a feeling of clarity. I hadn't realized until now just how much of the world was made up of different scents. I felt almost like I could've walked around the house blindfolded.
I licked my nose.
It was a moment before I got possession of myself again, after being in a moment of shock. They were connected. They had to be. My sense of smell suddenly improving right after getting into my bad habit of panting again? That didn't feel like a coincidence.
Anxiety began to creep through my body. I turned around to see my mom watching something on her tablet. I turned forward again... and let myself pant a little bit. This was a bad idea. A very bad idea. But I... I needed it. I needed that bit of comfort, as embarrassing as it was.
I pulled my tablet out of my pocket and unfolded it, searching online for... anything. I scoured medical journals, question sites, news articles, and anything else I could find. I found stuff about my tongue. We already knew my condition was called macroglossia, but other than talking later than expected and having to do speech in elementary school, it wasn't a major issue. No information on why I felt the need to pant, other than it being a nervous tic.
There wasn't much better information about my sudden boost of sense of smell. The condition was called hypersomia. While it did describe what I was dealing with, right down to it being a sudden change, none of the causes of it seemed to correlate. They were all more serious conditions that I would've noticed. Besides, I found it hard to believe that even in those cases sense of smell became this pronounced.
I breathed long and deep, trying not to freak out. As I breathed however, I felt my tongue start to creep back out of my mouth. I panted for a moment as I tried to think. I licked my nose.
No. I pulled my tongue back into my mouth. This had to stop. This was letting this get out of hand and I couldn't let it go any further. It was so... so hard though. For some reason the compulsion to do it felt stronger now than I ever had felt it in the past. The weird thing was that it didn't feel like I was craving some sort of high, like that I craved it - it more felt like I was forcing myself to not breathe... or to not sweat.
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The smells had been so distracting that I hadn't thought of how Ashley, as always during the winter, had the heat up high. Was this why I was feeling this bizarre instinct? Was it because of social stress from last night getting to my brain, and focusing on panting like a dog had reaffixed itself as a coping mechanism in my mind?
Panting like a dog. Smelling things like a dog. Maybe pirate-Ted was right, and "that thing be cursed." A curse. It was complete nonsense. There was no such thing as a curse, and the odds of someone cursing a lame game like Uno Dare were far less cool than something like Jumanji. It wasn't like Ted had felt pressured by some unseen force to keep acting like a pirate anyway.
Darn Ted. Even if he did get stuck with a pirate accent for his whole life girls would probably think it was cool anyway and fawn all over him.
My mom announced that some pancakes were ready, and as got up and went over to reached for one, Ashley rushed over to the plate. I was faster. Being a good winner, I let her have one of them. She complained anyway. She liked eating her pancakes in a stack for some reason.
I focused on eating my pancake, and not on my weird thoughts. Ashley talk about some boring thing going on with friends from her soccer team, and then got another pancake. When I finished my second one, I began lapping up the syrup from the plate.
Ashley laughed. "You're going at that plate like a dog."
I shook my head in disbelief. Why had I been doing that?
"No I'm not."
"You totally were," she said, "you were licking the heck out of that thing."
I shrunk back. I'd had a lapse in judgment and nearly outed what was going on with me all for a few more licks of syrup. Maybe it would be good for me to just get it over with, despite it being embarrassing. But... gosh. It just made me feel so childish, like if I'd had to tell my parents that I'd been feeling scared of the dark and needed a night light.
The rest of the weekend thankfully didn't have any more embarrassing moments like that. But despite my resistance, I just... I had to pant. I kept checking in the mirror and I felt a growing suspicion that my tongue was in fact getting longer. The enhanced smell didn't go away either. It was so weird grappling with it, because both.... both of them felt kind of good.
Regardless, it kept getting in the way. I kept having moments where I realized that I had been hanging my mouth open, and drooled slightly on my shirt. It was worse when I realized I'd licked my nose. The smelling had its own inconvenience in the form of a gross gutter I passed while on a walk.
Going to bed Sunday night I felt a quiet, simmering panic. This wasn't going to go away. I was going to have to do my best to control my nervous habit - or at least keep it secret. It wasn't helpful that while I wasn't a popular guy by any stretch, I wasn't the kind of person that could easily go unnoticed.
I sighed and let out a sob, then scrunched my eyes shut. This... sucked. Why did I have to deal with such a stupid weird problem? It probably sucked just as bad having drug issues like other kids at school, but at least that wasn't nearly so embarrassing. People understood why drugs were addictive, why they damaged people's lives. They didn't understand why someone would have a bad habit with panting like a dog.
But until it hopefully went away, I was going to have to figure it out. If it went away.
The awful thought kept trying to force it's way to the front of my mind. I tried to stop it but it materialized despite my best efforts.
...what if it got worse?