The Smell of Her
content disclaimer: obsession
She says good morning and I hear I miss you.
She says I’m busy and I hear I’m practicing how not to say your name.
She says it’s over and I hear prove me wrong.
I am not stupid. I just have a better sense of smell than most people.
You can laugh at that. People do. They think obsession is eyes or ears—screenshots, eavesdropping, long scrolls. But my obsession moved into my nose and paid six months’ rent in advance. It knows all the hallways where she lingers, all the shirts I should’ve washed last year, the exact pocket in the blue coat that still keeps a low note of her shampoo.
She wears sandalwood. She wore jasmine in summertime because I told her jasmine smells like being chosen. In winter, she wore the one I bought her: warm spice, a little pepper, amber that tastes like heat. I won’t say the brand because I am protecting us both from the way names make things too real. Call it O. Call it our undoing.
I gave O to her in a small bottle with gold edges. I had to save to do it. She unwrapped it and looked at me like it was the first generous act anyone had attempted in the history of air. “You did this?” she asked, which made me want to do it again forever.
When she left, she took the bottle. Of course she did. I told myself that was fair.
Now I smell O in the places she’s been, and also in the places she hasn’t—on street corners, in the elevator, at the grocery store in aisle five between pasta and the olives that claim they are imported. O finds me in line for coffee. O follows me through a crowd at the gallery opening where everyone is pretending to recognize everyone else. O swims up behind my left ear when I’m folding laundry. O sits down beside me on the city bus and crosses its legs.
I understand the internet can send the same bottle to anybody, anywhere. But the nose remembers (and lies), and my nose says she passed here, she passed five inches from this exact atom, she pulled the trigger on the sprayer and the cloud shaped itself in a letter I could read.
I follow the letter until it ends.
Evidence Log, 10:12 a.m.
Coffee shop on Maple and 7th. Doorbell ding. O arrives behind me like a decision already made. I close my eyes and it’s her, her, her, I could point to the breath. The bell dings again—somebody leaving—and O thins, like a promise that will not survive the block.
I stand there with my order and stupidly turn to the door as if I will be rewarded for correct smelling with a face. I see my own reflection and the kind of woman who holds her laptop like an apology. It isn’t her. The bell dings anyway.
“Next,” the barista says. I’m already holding the drink.
“Thank you,” I say, and I don’t mean for the coffee.
She texts me a joke about a dog on a skateboard. I respond with a video of a kid playing a violin too big for his chin. She says, “you’re ridiculous,” which I hear as “you’re mine,” which I translate as “we are in conversation,” which I hold like an egg.
When I tell her my building smells weird today—like somebody tried to bake bread and set the toaster on fire—she sends a laughing emoji and a nose. “You and your nose,” she says. She says it’s over. She also says my nose is funny. I pick the second thing and put it in my pocket like a coin I can spend later.
Theory of Scent #1 (unproven):
Certain smells are faithful. They stay loyal to the person who introduced you to them. Other people can wear them, but they won’t sit right. The note bends away from the impostor.
Counter-theory (also unproven):
The note bends toward what you want.
They told me to go outside. You should get some air. As if air itself isn’t what’s killing me.
On the steps of my building I pass a woman with a scarf so soft it looks like steam. O tumbles from her like an old song remixed. It is definitely O; it is absolutely not her. The woman smiles at something on her phone. A text. A meme. Maybe a picture of a dog on a skateboard.
I follow the woman because I am conducting research about the properties of desire and also because I have lost my mind. She goes into the bodega and buys a pear. I stand in front of the refrigerator case like a child who forgot their line in the school play. O climbs the cold air and presses a cold hand to my forehead.
I am not her.
The thought should be an ending. Instead it spawns new thoughts, little scared mice. If O is on not-her, then she was near here, telling a friend about the pear woman, saying, “I saw someone who smelled like me.” Or she gave the pear woman a hug yesterday because the pear woman cried at work. Or she sent the pear woman a link to O last year, and the pear woman bought it, and every day the pear woman wears it is a day where my ex is still in the room, invisible but audible if you’ve been trained.
I am very well-trained.
The last time we saw each other, we were polite. It made me want to throw something.
She said the words in a sober voice. “It’s over,” she said, “I’m not coming back,” and “you deserve air.”
I deserved air before. I was full of it. Don’t make it sound like a gift.
We stood in my hallway, not touching, like two people before a museum painting. Instead, I inhaled and there it was: O in a last, faint dress, pulled on for me. The rational mind said: of course she wore it, she owns it, it’s what she wears. The nose—that liar, that priest—said: she sprayed it for you. She wanted you to know the evening is real.
“It’s over,” she repeated, because she knows how I am. She said it like she was packing a bag.
I said, “Okay,” because I know how I am, too.
Rule I make for myself (and break):
No reading between lines she did not write.
Rule I make for myself (and break):
No walking the long way home to smell the street where her building is.
I tell Chance I’m fine. He says, “you smell like denial,” and I want to argue but denial doesn’t have a smell (or it smells exactly like whatever you need it to smell like, which is even worse).
“People wear the same fragrance,” he says carefully. “That’s why it’s on shelves.”
“She doesn’t just wear it,” I say. “She stains time with it.”
“You hear yourself?”
“I try not to.”
He hugs me and I smell detergent, an honest smell, a smell that does not lie. “You’ll be okay,” he says. He does not say when.
Control Test #1:
I go to a department store and spray O on myself. I walk around the block twice and see if it works: if I become her.
O rises and falls as I move, a trick candle that refuses to die. I close my eyes and her neck arrives, exactly where my hand remembers. It is not magic. It is the act of pouring hunger into a bottle and calling it science.
I fail the control test and buy a sample I can keep in my pocket. I do not tell anyone. I spray it into the closet when a shirt forgets. I spray it into my car and drive with the windows up, choking gently on good memories. I spray it in my hair and hate myself and do it again, because the way I feel afterward is not hate exactly. Hate is honest, clean-edged. This is a dirty love or a lovedirty. It muddies me to my knees and I say thank you like a pilgrim who fell on purpose.
Text, 9:03 p.m.
Her: You would have loved the pasta I made tonight. I added lemon zest like you do.
Me: Let me be the judge of that. Bring me some.
Her: You’re ridiculous.
I press the phone to my face and it smells like phone. I want to find a way to smell the little green bubble, to see if lemon has a digital shadow. I want to live in a world where texts emit the powder of the moment they describe.
She said, “it’s over.” She added lemon zest like I do.
Bad math: when 1 (“it’s over”) + 1 (“lemon like you”) = 3 (“you’re still in my kitchen somehow”). If I know it’s bad math, does that make it better or worse?
The first time I smelled her after we broke up, I was walking past a florist. It could have been the flowers, sure. White lilies go high and jasmine goes everywhere and roses will lie to your face if you pay extra. But between the sugar and the green, O stepped forward and put its hands in my pockets. I stopped moving the way a toy stops when its pullstring runs out. I turned and saw the florist arranging stems with a knife like a small ceremony.
“What’s that smell?” I asked. He looked up, surprised.
“Flower shop,” he said.
“No. The other thing.”
“I just came back from lunch,” he offered. “Maybe you smell that.” He wiped his hands on his apron as if scent is something you can get off with friction.
I walked away and stood at the corner like a person who forgot where corners go.
I texted her nothing. I texted her hi. I deleted hi because hi is for people in balance. I held the phone and it heated my palm like small weather.
Theory of Scent #2 (worse than #1):
If you love someone hard enough, your body will make them out of thin air.
Counter-theory (also worse):
Thin air prefers to be left alone.
She invites me to a reading. The poet talks about mothers. I try to listen as if I live here in this chair with my hands in my lap. The poet’s voice is the kind that makes you feel like you need to straighten your posture and call someone you hurt. I breathe in and there it is again: O like a secret in a warm pocket. It’s not strong—more like the memory of strong. I imagine it rising from the scarf around her neck, from the place behind her ear where my mouth used to rest, from the wrist she twisted when nervous.
I don’t look over. I promised myself: no looking. I listen to the poet’s last line: love is what the body refuses to drop. The room claps. I finally turn my head one inch, then two, and take in the back of her shoulder. The sweater I liked when I liked everything. I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth until it hurts. This is a trick for stopping tears (it works about as well as the other tricks).
After, she hugs me politely. O says the opposite of polite. She steps back. “You okay?” she asks, which is a question people ask when they are trying to keep the floor level.
“Always,” I say.
“You’re a bad liar,” she says, and it’s an old script but I let it play because it sounds like us.
On the train home I smell O again and consider the odds. Maybe it’s on the seat back from someone earlier. Maybe it’s on my scarf from leaning toward her. Maybe the city itself has decided to humidify with my grief. Maybe the nose remembers and lies and is also a loyal animal trying to lead me where it thinks I need to go.
The therapist says, “What would it mean to accept it?” and I say, “I do accept it,” and she says, “Your nose does not,” and I laugh because it’s funny until it isn’t.
“What would acceptance smell like?” she asks.
“Laundry,” I say without thinking. “A clean shirt from a drawer.”
“What’s a smell you don’t want?”
“Burnt sugar.”
“When you smell O, could you practice smelling laundry too?” she says gently. “Not to cancel it. To add something that isn’t her.”
I try. I keep a T-shirt folded in my tote bag like a ridiculous talisman. When O arrives uninvited, I press the shirt to my face and breathe the good, flat smell of being alive. Sometimes it helps the way water helps: it is what it is. Sometimes I just end up crying into a T-shirt on public transit like a person in a play no one asked to see.
Evidence Log, 6:41 p.m.
Grocery store, aisle five. A child is wailing because the right cereal is not here and will never be here again. O is here, however: top note, familiar spice. I could draw the bottle from memory. I could draw the nightstand where it lived. I could draw her hand holding it casually, spraying once, twice, stepping through the cloud with the calm of someone who believes in her own future.
I follow the smell to the back, to the small display of candles nobody buys. The candles have names like Gratitude and Sunday Linen and Honest Forest (as if any forest is honest). I stand there until the smell thins. It takes its time leaving, like a person who wants to be asked to stay.
When I get home I pull down the old blue coat and find the pocket where the low note still lives. It’s not O exactly—it’s the ghost of O, the way a voice sounds when you’ve already walked out of the room. I press the pocket to my face and, just this once, I let myself believe the lie that keeps me kind: she sprayed it for me. She walked past my door at 6:02 p.m. and lifted her wrist and the air received her, and some hydrogen and oxygen molecules remembered their assignment and traveled here, enlisted, obedient.
I know the world is large. I understand shipping. But the world is also small when a smell decides to make your apartment a shrine.
What I don’t tell anybody: I keep the sample bottle of O in a box under my bed and sometimes I open it and don’t spray anything. I simply allow. The scent finds the air, pulls up a chair, tells me a story where we are not broken, where she is late and laughing, where my nose is a genius and a fraud and I do not care because I am allowed to sit in the broken thing until it stops being broken, or at least until I can stand up without dropping everything I am holding.
I am learning to forgive myself for the way I carry her. This is not poetry; it is plumbing. I am unclogging what I blocked on purpose.
I imagine acceptance as a shelf I build strong enough to hold two truths:
It’s over.
I still smell her everywhere.
Both can live in this room without a fight. Both can sit at my table and eat something small and edible—bread and olives; a pear from the woman in the scarf—and both can leave when I say it’s time.
She texts late: a picture of her hand beside a mug. The caption: Look who learned latte art. The foam is a shaky heart. I write and erase ten answers and land on the one that feels like a window, not a door.
Proud of you, I type. Looks delicious.
It is, she writes. Then, Sleep well.
I set the phone down on the clean shirt, just because. I open the window a crack. Night moves in without asking permission. Somewhere someone is stirring sugar into coffee, clockwise. Somewhere a florist is going home with green on his hands. Somewhere my ex is brushing her teeth and not thinking of me in a way that hurts and helps.
I lay on the couch the way a person does when they have learned at least one thing. I inhale. For a breath I catch O, or a cousin of O, or a story that O tells itself when it is lonely. I exhale and smell laundry. Both are true. The nose remembers and lies. The body learns to tell the truth anyway.
I whisper into the ceiling, because the ceiling is the only witness I can stand: It’s over. Then softer: I love you still. Then, finally, the sentence that makes the others survivable: I will love you from here.
I do not check the hallway. I do not spray the air. I do not hold my breath waiting for the bell. I close my eyes and let the night be night and the smell be smell, and I practice the plain grace of staying.
In the morning, I will wash the blue coat and put the pocket back in circulation. I will walk past the florist and buy nothing, but I will wave. I will go to aisle five and not look for anything I already own. If O finds me there, I will nod the way you nod at an old friend across a crowded room: yes, I see you; yes, we shared a life; no, I will not be following you home.
And when she texts good morning, I will hear good morning. Only that. And it will be enough.
