The Very Smell of You

It seems only yesterday we were sitting at your kitchen table. I had tried to wipe away the condensation on the window with the sleeve of my jumper, wincing as the wetness soaked through the threadbare material. Your eyes twinkled as you offered me the still-warm kettle to warm my hands on. And I had smiled as the evaporating water filled the room with the smell of wet dog. I remember trying to hold onto that pale, almost ethereal, greyness of the morning, but the moment slipped through my cupped hands even as I clenched my fingers tighter together. You tried to make tea. I counted your fridge magnets, trying to recreate the childhood you so stubbornly keep locked inside. We watched the sun rise through your venetian blinds, and hummed along to the music of the dust particle who danced under rays of morning’s spotlight. You tapped out their symphony on the wooden table, tracing the indentations left by too many forgotten coasters. I made wishes on loose eyelashes, thinking of warmth.

I realise now that your very smell defies warmth, just as it denies strawberries, fields of freshly mown grass and wet hair dripping onto old tee-shirts. For you smell like a lone traffic light, standing at the end of an old dirt track. I would have waited for you on that forgotten highway. You would have told me to stop, when the only oncoming traffic comprises skeletal leaves that Autumn forgot to pack.

Many midnights passed, I let the flickering blue light of the computer screen fall onto the back of a loosely clenched fist. I would find myself leaning into the stillness, allowing a smile to tug at ends of my lips with the sound of every soft click. That gentle glow would cast shadows on the books I pretend to read, placed mock naturally on the bedside drawer. I’m sorry I did not heed you, when you said to look for the wherefor, and not the why. I was only smart enough to see what was present and visible, too afraid of hurting to seek that which was present, but underneath.

But I can’t stop looking for your name, printed somewhere in size ten Helvetica. When the phone sounds at three in the insomniac’s morning, I find myself trying to muffle the inevitability of slurred speech and strange voices. I try to remember the sound of your deep throated chuckle, as you lean back on the back legs of your tattered chair. You would hum off-key, feel-good rock anthems as I paint hyperbolas with no asymptotes on pane dawn left wet with tears. I blinked away a piece of sleep, grinned, and called it abstract art.