There’s a bottle on my desk, number forty-something, and it’s wrong the same way the last forty have been wrong.
There’s a bottle on my desk. Number forty-something. I smelt it this morning, and it was wrong, the same way the last forty have been wrong.
When I was five, my uncle sprayed perfume onto the back of my hand at a family gathering. It was the first time I’d ever smelt one. I lifted my wrist to my nose, and something shifted, but I couldn’t tell you what. I just kept smelling it.
I couldn’t tell you the notes. But the way it made me feel, I remember like yesterday.
That’s the whole problem. The memory isn’t a smell. It’s a five-year-old noticing, for the first time, that something invisible could feel like that. No oil does that. I keep going anyway. The smell might not exist. Everything I’ve made trying to find it does.