Scents

Half a lifetime ago I lost my sense of smell. Anosmia is a side effect of the traumatic brain injury that put me in a coma and nearly killed me. People who’ve been through covid may be finding wine, olive oil, or bodies similarly scentless. That summer, I met someone beautiful who offered to get close to me by letting me know what my smell is like, and it brought a tear to my eye, since it was the first time someone had thought to smell for me - how gentle! That was too much too soon, so they called it off, and I spent the next half year in a deeply dissociative fugue state - mute, sleepless, wandering into things - reliving the coma from an act of kindness I was too shaken to acknowledge the significance of.