Twenty One Pilots once said, “Sometimes a certain smell will take me back to when I was young/ How come I’m never able to identify where it’s coming from?” Like this song, our minds have a tendency to stitch scents to memories, binding us to moments long after they’ve passed. A single whiff of a burning candle can pull us back to childhood birthdays, and a stranger’s perfume can remind us of someone we loved too much to keep. It’s both beautiful and cruel- beautiful when the memory is warm, cruel when it drags you back to someone or something you’d give anything to forget. If something of yours still smells like someone you’re trying to get over, then, my condolences. I know what that feels like.
Because, beneath my bed, shoved into the shadows where no one can see it, lies a blanket folded into itself like a secret. If you press your face into it, there’s a musk there- warm, grounding, threaded with something faintly fruity if you breathe deeply enough. It is a scent stitched with contradiction- joy and wonder folded into heartbreak. Because it doesn’t just smell like fabric. It smells like nights with soft smiles, and a hand brushing my hair behind my ear. It smells like a smile with teeth, imperfect and crooked, the one which somehow makes people more beautiful, more real, as though flaws are a kind of truth.
I never thought scent could carry so much weight until I realized how it could pin me to someone who isn’t here anymore. The blanket smells like a voice smaller than usual as it told me something no one else knew. It smells like the warmth of a person pressed into skin, like the quiet safety of temporarily knowing that you were wanted, you were cared for. It smells like knowing you’ll be missed. And it smells like the sharpness of loss, the silence after words were left unsaid. The kind of goodbye that was never spoken but still managed to hollow me out.
One day, I know, the scent will fade, dissolved by time until all that remains is the sterile neutrality of laundry detergent. But until then, I’ll pretend. I bury my face in the blanket and trick myself into believing the memory is still alive- that it hasn’t already slipped into the past and I’m not already supposed to be moving on. Because memory clings the way scent does- invisible, impossible to hold on to. It chains you to a version of yourself you thought you’d already outgrown.
And maybe that’s why it hurts. Because it isn’t just the blanket that carries memories. It’s in the world outside, too. In the air after rain. In the sharp breath of petrichor when the skies finally split open. That smell- the intoxicating perfume of wet soil- reminds me of monsoons in Mumbai, of childhood evenings spent shrieking in the downpour, of joy so simple it felt infinite. But now, petrichor is different. It doesn’t just pull me back to the freedom of childhood. It drags me to my past. It reminds me of how joy sat so easily between two different people, until it didn’t. The rain doesn’t just fall anymore- it engulfs me, the same way missing someone does.
Scents are strange like that. They seep into the corners of memory where words can’t reach. They remind you of things you wish you could forget. The blanket under my bed smells like a person I cared for too much to keep, like the laughter that once filled a room, like the goodbye no one ever said. The rain smells like childhood skies blurred into watercolor grey, but now it also smells like the echo of a smile with one left-sided dimple and crooked teeth, like something beautiful that refused to stay.
Maybe that’s what memory is meant to be: a lingering perfume, sweet until it burns, permanent until it isn’t. A scent that doesn’t just remind me of who I was, but of who I loved, and of how even loss can cling like a second skin. It reminds me that I am nothing but the sum of my memories, and my memories are the people I meet.
“I’d make a candle out of it if I ever found it
Try to sell it, never sell, out of it, I’d probably only sell one
It’d be to my brother, ’cause we have the same nose
Same clothes, homegrown, a stone’s throw from a creek we used to roam.”