The first time I understood loss was when I threw your t-shirt away in the dustbin, sealed in a plastic bag since the day you left for the States all those years ago-breathing in it one last time knowing I’d never hold another who smelt like you.

We were asked to think about smells today, yours was the one that came to mind when I first closed my eyes. That is what I remember the most about you. That is how I remember you. The smell of a man. The smell that overpowered my consciousness and drove me to give myself away more than I had intended to. The smell of my sexual initiation.

I am part you now and you are part me by the virtue of the momentary coming together of bodies.

Since you there have been many men whose name I do not care to remember, their faces fading into, merging with those I walk past every day, the taste of their warm moist skin, the scent of their body, how they felt inside me is a distinct memory, piercing and clear as the sun. These unnamed smells remind me of the trade, of that what was taken from me reducing me forever. 

Before you I did not know what leaving meant, you were the first man I walked away from. I did not know how it felt referring to them in the past tense, as if dead. And ever since I have ceased to know what it feels like to not leave- to stay. Jiase paragkosh vartika ke hoontho ko chuye bina hi bikhar gaye ho[1]. Who knew a man’s love could be so tender?

My mom tells me I smell like my father, his odour a bit stronger than mine, reminds me of when he used to come back home, tired, his shirt soaked through even in winters filling up the entire house- my room smelling like a pile of his unwashed laundry. 

Life seems colorless in such moments, have I widowed myself? will it always be like this? Empty and cold. It is dawn now, an excuse to head out and breathe among men rushing past me, perhaps one among them would wait, come up to me, hold me. Make me forget in the firm embrace of his arms the smells of ghosts that still cling to me. Make me come here, to the present.

To me a smell is a shrine of the memory of people I have loved and lost. People who I miss but can no longer hold.

[1] Translation: as if the stamens fell even before kissing the stigma of the flower