Smell- III: The Smell of Sleep

Each time I think about us, I think about the smell of your sleep lingering in the bedroom. As soon I wake up, I wouldn’t smell a thing. But as I return to the bedroom from the bathroom, I wouldn’t have to see you there, lying splattered like a bat on the bed cover, to know that you were there- I could feel the air telling me that. Does everyone have a smell in their sleep? You definitely did. What was it, a smell of your drool, or your farts, or your sweat? Or was it the smell of your thoughts and dreams that went unsaid as you lay down next to me? Was that what I thought I was smelling- the perfumes of all those men and women, whom you claimed you had loved before me, and along with me, all arising from you, as you slept, trying to get away from your dreams as far as possible.

Somehow, that smell was the sign of our intimacy. What I couldn’t find while we were in bed, naked, or close to naked or what I searched for in the movement of your eyes as you slept, that I could whiff in the air, in the early morning. Floating in the air, and making its way to the windows and under the doors, it would try to crawl into obscurity, and yet, never could.

All the walks that you would go for, those narrow paths that you talked about- between the crooked buildings- do you gather the scents from there- the smells of cigarette stubs and piss and rotting vegetables? Or the smell of salty water from the oceans that you said you would like to swim in? Do I smell tomato peels smoking on a dry pan, just a tinge of burn on them? Or is that the smell of the first froth of shampoo when you wash your hair after a long bus ride- the fumes of diesel still breathing? Or is it just the smell of voyages, of journeys, and of short jogs across the park, the short jogs that your thoughts go for, trying to escape the mundane and to seek solace in things that never were?

Sleep, you who give this room this vast definition of fantasies and daydream; but how tragic it is that you cannot smell what you leave behind for me to devour in the mornings! And yet, I only hope that when you go to bed alone, our jumble of hair in the washbasin- that curly mass of hair and facewash froth- shall also find its way into that conglomerate of smells you carry around. Each dawn trying to escape, and yet sometime as you sleep, they return, unable to pretend that they do not hear your beckoning.