KEYANANA

I met a boy who smells like you.

It wasn’t the first thing I noticed about him, nor did it creep up on me in the way that red flags remain hidden until it’s too late. Breathing whiskey, he whispered about jazz, and I crumbled, leaning in – and there it was, wham. That sick-sweet stench filling my nose until I tasted fifteen, mouth dry, heaving. A small part of me groped for air in protest but I trampled it, down, standing in a bar, surrounded by strangers. Not to make a scene. Not to suffer loudly. Not to draw attention.

But, here was this boy who smelled like the past. 

I can’t even quantify it, the smell. It has no comparisons or references. Is it a combination of qualities? The writer’s guilt, the insecurities, the arbitrary judgment calls? But none of these things correspond to scent. 

Now sometimes when I spend time with him I wonder where you are and what you have been doing with your life. You never liked the internet so I looked up your girlfriend instead, only she isn’t your girlfriend anymore, and you have subsumed into nothingness. Because how can anyone exist if they do not have a persona separate from themselves, a fiction to obscure flesh?

Your name is not distinct enough to be Google-able. 

An email would be too personal, a violation of the trust I have placed in myself to leave old wounds unsalted, an invitation I cannot give.

So instead I finger the book of Neil Gaiman’s short stories that you gave to me, the lines scrawled in the margins, think how you said that Harlequin Valentine reminded you of me. Flattered at first, I had read the story, and realized, betrayed, that you were holding your projection of me against a reality that had never existed. 

Timing is everything. We were not meant to meet at fifteen, still scared, dishonest, unwilling to know the truth about ourselves.

I could have loved you.

Perhaps I did.