A Lingering Sense

Heat. As soon as she smelled it she felt it.

A burning cinnamon inside her nostrils, singing her sinuses. It was the harshness that remained even after it had passed. It always caught her after the person wore it was long gone, hitting her hard, filling her, and leaving its presence even in its absence.

The feeling would remain long after the scent. Like a recent memory in her brain like she could reach out and grab but grasp nothing but air.

Millie had long ago given up on whipping her head around in the streets to look for the wearer as soon as she recognized the scent. Even when she had previously looked around her she could only go off of her assumptions of who could be wearing it.

Could it be the man in the grey suit with the widow’s peak waving down a taxi? The teenager in the flannel, dressed in the nineties grunge fashion that had reemerged with the so-called hipsters in the two thousand and tens but was somehow still relevant now. Perhaps girl in the wrinkled men’s shirt, borrowing the toiletries of the man she had spent the night with?

Now she just accepted that no matter how many times she turned around she wasn’t going to find the wearer that she wanted it to be.

She would always be looking for a stranger passing in the crowd wearing the same fragrance as him but hoping that it would be him. Hoping that he still wore it.

Although maybe now sixteen years later he would be a stranger to her as well. Someone she wouldn’t even recognize on a street corner unless she looked really hard. Harder than being a casually passing stranger would allow.

It was that fleeting thought that nagged at her.

What if she passed him and could clearly see his face, not just a glimpse, but still not know it was him and keep walking, not even knowing that the moment had happened.

She often wondered what he looked like now, if time’s passing made sense and he still resembled the person from sixteen years ago, dressed the same or if time had removed him from himself and he was completely from who he had been back then.

There were so many people that Millie had observed aging over the years. Her friend from high school with the same haircut that still looked like the seventeen year old version of herself. Her boss who had not approached middle age kindly, starting to bald and thickening around the middle after twenty years of buying wine by the bottle at client dinners and taking daily smoke breaks in front of the building. Her coworker who looked nothing like the version of herself from three years ago after replacing cardigans with sharp fashionable blazers and wearing heels instead of flats to the office, touching up her bold lipsticks in the women’s room at lunchtime.

Sixteen years ago person she had known him as was an adult by age but still just a boy.

She was also just girl then and felt like one even though she had been twenty-one.

Millie was going through the motions of adulthood but not feeling like she was truly in it. Old enough to have her own place but still feeling like a teenager, sneaking him around her roommates. Old enough to buy her own liquor but still drinking the same plastic bottled off brand vodka from her university days.

She had been the one who bought him the cologne on his twenty-third birthday, holding out the department store gift bag and watching him pull out the tissue papers one by one, laughing when he saw the bottle of cologne and chased her around the tiny bedroom pretending to spray her with it. Except he pressed the sensitive nozzle a touch too hard and actually did spray. It caught her mouth and her hair and she coughed waving her hand in front of her face trying to ease the sting of the cinnamon mixed with vanilla.

It was the same smell that permeated his bed sheets as if he had spritzed that cologne on his pillow rather than the odor that layered over time just from him sleeping in his bed. She smelled it on him everyday he was with him. No matter how the day wore it off him she could still detect it on him at the end of every evening.

Millie wondered if he had grown up on the outside the way she had, wearing business clothes every weekday in the streets, paying the same amount for regular haircuts as a dinner with drinks in order to look professional and well maintained.

If his lifestyle had changed in their thirties the way hers had where her weekends were spent going to dinner parties of acquaintances and gallery openings in the evenings rather the nights of her twenties lived out at bars and the parties of strangers her friends knew that lasted until the early morning hours.

The contents of his life were a complete mystery to her.

She would never know because he was the one she could never go back to. The door that had been open to her then was shut now, locked. She could never open communication between them, fix what she had broken even if she wanted to.

Every time she ached for true closure and absolution it was like her palms were pressed against a door that had been locked with a chain. The thoughts giving way to what ifs and being stopped with the force of remembering and realization.

There had been another guy. In the dim bar, when she was drunk off of the tequila shots that she had downed twenty minutes before while the taste of raw alcohol lingered in her mouth.

This kiss was not out of want; it was out of a liquor-fueled need. Wasn’t pleasant but was enough to satisfy the desire.

She didn’t comprehend the reason her friends all looked at her with equal parts shock, disgust and confusion as she walked back toward their table. Their three expressions combined filled her with comical surprise, “What?” she giggled.

Until she slowly made the connection in her drunken state and the laugh caught in her throat, leaking down into the pit of her stomach, engulfing her whole body in sick guilt. She wasn’t drunk anymore, the realization leaving her paralyzing sober.

“Oh my god,” she whispered, nausea starting to churn painfully in her stomach, the start of a feeling that would remain with her. Time would only lessen but not cure it.

She stumbled outside and sat on the curb outside stunned, not feeling the chill on her skin or the tears soaking her face. She was there for what felt like hours, her thoughts racing and standing still at the same time.

She knew the smell so well because after they had broken up and she had left his room for what she knew would be the last time, hiding her swollen eyes from his roommates as she exited the apartment, she bought a bottle of the same cologne on the way home.

Later, in her depressed state she had actually sprayed it on her pillow so that she could keep the agonizing pain at bay by having a few seconds of him in reality with her.

In the coming days the scent burned her like the cold burn of mint. Prompting her to wash her sheets multiple times a day over next few weeks trying to get the now intrusive smell out.

She had told herself that when the bottle ran out she wouldn’t hurt anymore but it only took days she threw the bottle into the outside dumpster out of anger and frustration at herself. The blue glass bottle scattered into pieces as it made contact with the metal, joining the fragments of beer and wine bottles collecting at the bottom. She thought it would be satisfying but as she looked at the shattered glass she felt no relief. 

This feeling, still clear in her memory made her walk at a quicker pace until she arrived at the door to her own building, hurrying up the steps, into the elevator, unlocking the apartment door. She didn’t even drop her bag or take off her shoes in the doorway. She brushed past until she was standing in front of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.

She opened it and pulled out the cologne her husband wore.

The man who was everything that he was not, and nothing that he had been.

She spritzed a cloud in front of the mirror, ignoring her watering eyes from the strength as the cloud settled, dispersing into thin air, mixing somewhat appealingly with the lemon coming from the diffuser plugged in next to the toilet.

Millie waited before inhaling the husky smell of cloves and pine that rushed to fill the space of the memory. Soothing the burn like morphine and easing every next breath as she forgot what her guilt smelled like.