Never Eat This Soup
I'm just a malfunctioning alien-human hybrid publishing my thoughts and experiences
In 2022, I spent around 6 months living in a homeless shelter. It wasn't as bad as I thought aside from my first experience inside the actual building. I sat down at a table and was waiting to get assigned a bed, minding my own business and was as quiet as I usually am. Someone adjacent to me furrowed their brow, turned their head slowly to face me and said "Whaaaaaat?". Me: "I...I didn't say anything". He launched up from his seat in anger and shouted "Don't f****** look at me!!!" and walked away. I thought, "damn, I'm in for a wild ride aren't I".
I just been tasered by the police for the first time the day before and so I was glad that the shelter turned out to be a very nice place, with extremely helpful and friendly staff, and the clients too. A note on being tasered, it said the discharge time was only 5 seconds but it felt like an eternity convulsing on the pavement. All the typical stuffed ensued at the shelter: overdoses, fights, thefts of various things, found a dirty uncapped syringe a foot from my face one morning, we also had one one death... the guy who yelled at me when I first came in. That was my first time seeing a dead body. I wasn't particularly averse to the sight of a dead body, but what I did note is that apparently he came in, got to the foot of his bed and then just dropped according to someone. His head was partially on the pillow too, so it probably looked like he was sleeping as people walked by his body during the night. If he had dropped on the floor or even significantly off his bed as the space between them is narrow, someone would've realized what had happened and may have saved his life.
I lived in the shelter for around 6 months then got housed. The staff from the shelter were so kind that they did a shopping run at Walmart for me and purchased various items like a garbage can, broom, towels, toiletry items and some food amongst other things. Around the 3 or 4 month mark of living there, I noticed that a can of soup purchased on that Walmart run was still sitting on my shelf. My shelves had run down at times, but had somehow managed not to be consumed.
When I got rehoused to my current apartment 2 years ago, the can of soup came with me. At a certain point I realized I could never eat the soup from that can given how long it had survived without me getting opening it up. So I glued a label that said "Never eat this soup" on it and sat it on the windowsill of my room where it remains to this day.
The label is wilting and sun-faded, there's a bit of rust on the top lid, the bottom is pristine. For the first time since I glued that label on, the "do not eat this soup" will be tested as my food stocks have run low from poor planning. In the end I hope I do not eat it.
Could this be the human construct called "sentimental value"? If so, it's only one of two other objects in my entire life which I have sentimental value of. The other shall remain nameless, but that object has obvious reasons for sentimentality. I wonder though, has sentimentality been inappropriately applied to this can of minestrone?
