Gourmand Ghost
I still smell you
even when you are nowhere near me.
It hides in ridiculous places—
in my room,
on strangers passing too close,
between the pages of books
I know you never touched.
That sweet gourmand perfume of yours
has ruined my understanding of absence.
Because how can someone leave
and still linger everywhere?
I remember every conversation
we ever had about scents.
The important ones.
The stupid ones.
The ones that should’ve dissolved into nothing
but instead stayed preserved inside me.
You’d talk about fragrances
like they were philosophy.
And I listened
like your voice itself was perfume—
something I could wear later
when you were gone.
Now I replay everything.
Every “this smells expensive.”
Every “you’d like this one.”
Every moment I leaned closer
just to breathe you in
without making it obvious.
And maybe that is the cruelest part of love—
how ordinary things become sacred afterwards.
A scent.
A joke.
A sentence nobody else would remember.
I think the deepest bonds are the quiet ones.
The ones built from repetition.
Tiny rituals.
Shared conversations.
Developing interest in something because of how much you talk about it
So now, without it,
I feel starved.
Like my body still reaches
for something
my life no longer contains.
And I hate how grief can make a person feel.
How I can stand still for one second too long
after smelling your perfume on nothing,
and suddenly the whole world feels like torture.
Because for a moment
it feels like you came back.
And then you don’t.