my indifference smells awful at the moment

i get in from work to find all the entrances to the building are wide open. incense is lit on a table in the hallway on the first floor. it hit me as soon as i walked through the front door. something smelt awful. it was beyond awful. it was putrid, enough to inspire a gag. i ran to get my mail in my mailbox and bumped into one of my neighbors. i asked him what that smell was but he had no idea. he just knew it was awful and putrid as well (he was the one who decided to open all the doors and to light a scented candle and a stick of incense in the hallway).

i get inside and my mind starts to wander. what could that smell be? at best, it could be someones cooking project gone horribly wrong. someone who had messed up a seafood dish so bad that they would refuse to be seen in the daylight by any of their neighbors until that smell went away.

but it was too rancid to be something cooked. it had to be something worse than that.

as i write this, i have no idea what it is. but the worst case scenario in my head is that one of my neighbors is dead, and their body is rotting away.

i usually don't see much of my neighbors. i work odder hours and am more of a night owl than most of the other tenants in this building. if someone hadn't been seen for a few days, a week, a couple of weeks, i'd be the last to figure it out.

just how long does it take for the smell of a rotting corpse to get bad anyways?

there's a slight part of me that thinks i should call someone, i don't know who exactly, maybe the police. but i know i won't do that. this is where my indifference kicks in. i convince myself that i'm just making things up and it's nothing as bad as the rotting corpse of one of my neighbors. there's no way that's the case and if i did call the authorities, they'd show up and think i was crazy. then i'm the crazy dude who no one ever sees during normal hours who called the cops that one time because i thought my neighbor was dead, but it wasn't that at all. it was just rancid fish dinner tuesday in a6.

but what if my neighbor is dead and i decided to do nothing about it? i caught the smell and ignored it so i could watch tv and write this blog in the peace and comfort of my apartment.

if my worst case scenario is true, then i would be the dude who's indifference led to family and/or friends finding out later than they possibly could have. sure, dead is dead, but they'd accuse me of insensitivity. if they read this blog they'd think i'm sick. if in fact someones relative or loved one is dead next door, not only did the thought cross my mind that they might be dead, but i ignored that thought and decided to do nothing about it. i did nothing about poor grandma or aunt so-and-so who makes the awesome peanut butter cookies each year around christmas time.

their loved one would be dead... most likely of natural causes of some sort. and with no killer, nobody to blame, this blog would put me in running to be their bad guy.

but this is all just the paranoid part of my imagination running wild. chances are a dead body is not the cause of that horrible smell.

all i know is something smells awful, and i'm pretty sure it's not my indifference.