grief wears my perfume now
some memories rot sweet
i still shudder at the smell. not because it bothers me, not anymore, but because it remembers. it pokes its head in ahead of her. it arrives as a memory i did not call, encircling my neck like she used to, while laughing, while playing pretend we would be together longer than we were. i once read that smell is the sense most closely tied to memory, and maybe that’s why grief chose to wear her perfume, because it knew that if it knocked on the front door, i’d never let it in. but if it wore her scent, it could crawl into bed with me.
i catch it in the elevator sometimes - not her, just the ghost of her. a stranger wearing her. the same citrusy top note. the same searing jasmine middle. the same soft sandalwood fade. and i am no longer a man in 27B on my way to work. i am twenty-one and drunk again off the nape of her neck. the past does not come back in linear fashion, but in skin. in odors. in muscles. and that is the cruelest part of having lost her, not that she is lost, but that fragments of her keep popping up uninvited.
we didn't end in a bang. we ended in a room that went silent. i don't even remember the last thing she said, and maybe that is the worst, that you don't always know when it is the last time. you think there will be another kiss. another fight. another hold that turns into forgiveness. but some people don't even say goodbye. they just quit answering calls. and you're left holding questions like damp flowers, still hoping they will bloom.
it's strange, the way someone can occupy so much of your emotional space, then disappear as if they were a mirage. i glance through pictures of us these days and it feels like robbery. like someone swiped a copy of me i miss. i was gentler then. bolder in ways i didn't know would prove to be my ruin. and she, lord, she was myth in a denim jacket. a legend i retold even after the tale had been reduced to ashes. we weren't love. we were in harmony. and that's rarer than people realize, when one person fits your head and heart both. when you stop being mirrors and start being windows to one another.
but at some point on the timeline, she turned the doorknob in her own life, and i wasn't there anymore waiting. maybe she got tired of waiting. maybe she needed something more than what i could give when i was still bleeding from earlier. or maybe, and this is the one that i don't say, maybe she grew out of the me she fell in love with. because sometimes people don't leave because of hate or betrayal, they leave because of love, as wild as it may be, not always being strong enough to weather the seasons.
and now, years later, sorrow no longer shouts. it doesn't cry. it doesn't shatter dishes or play our song or wear her sweaters. grief simply smells like her. and that's worse, in a way. because it's quiet. it's polite. it haunts. it rides the train beside me, a passenger with no baggage. it mutters her jokes beneath its breath simply to test whether i'll smile. it brings her perfume with it, well knowing i'll look for her face the instant it goes by.
i don't cry about her anymore. not like i used to. not like the first six months, where each friend was a therapist and each pillow a confession. now it's hushed. it's wiser. it's the kind of pain that doesn't call for attention but wants to be seen nonetheless. like a scar that's no longer painful but still remembers the blade. she's no longer the wound, she's the weather. and certain days, even the sun tastes like rain.
there are moments when i think i've moved on. and maybe i have, the way rivers keep flowing even though they still carry traces of the mountain they left behind. but recovery is a strange kind of deceit. it enables you to smile at other people but still hear someone else's name ringing in your head. it enables you to love again, yes. but without echo.
and if she ever asked me if i'd do it all over again, the falling, the fire, the silence, the smell, i think i'd still answer yes. not because i'm a glutton for pain. not because i like the ache. but because she showed me something only heartbreak can teach: that to love someone completely is to give them the map of your destruction and hope they don't make a bomb of it.
and maybe she did. or maybe we both did, unbeknownst to us. but god, it was beautiful for as long as it lasted.