There are scents I wish I could forget, but they return anyway.
They come uninvited—ghosts of a past life—
as if the molecules themselves carried their own will.
I remember the embalming fluid, that faint chemical sting that told me something wasn’t right.
I remember the cologne of 1993, brash and heavy, the kind that hollered through a doorway long before its wearer appeared.
It was always the old man’s scent, though the body inside it tried to be young.
I remember the door, cold under my hand.
And the room behind it, not Michelangelo’s fresco but a haze of reefer smoke and lost eyes.
The baseheads gathered in the back, laughing, forgetting, falling into themselves.
Another chapter written in ash.
And yet—there was something liberating there.
A fleeting moment where even ruin tasted like freedom.
Scent was the only constant, weaving the holy and the profane together, daring me to notice, daring me to feel.
I do not judge these phantoms anymore.
I simply carry them.
The smells, the shadows, the contradictions—they belong to me, to the person I was, to the fragments of light I am still learning to piece together.
Every fragrance is a memory.
Every memory, an elegy.
And every elegy—if you wait long enough—
smells like home.