The air smelled sweet when they were together. Sweet and, not soft, but yielding, like microwaved ice cream. When his skin pressed hers and his hands found the creases in her skin, their bodies produced a smell- not quite vanilla, not butterscotch, darker than honey, softer than licorice.

He didn’t taste sweet. He tasted slightly bitter and vaguely salty. He sometimes smelled musty, sometimes sour. So did she. So she knew that the sweetness was the result of their togetherness, and she learned to expect it when she felt the texture of his back against her stomach at night.

That was how she knew she never wanted to love anyone else, because when he was gone she curled her knees under her jawbone and could not find a cookie that would satisfy her, no caramel tasted exactly right. She sometimes convinced herself that she could live without their sweetness, though she knew she could never forget what it was like or pretend that it wasn’t what she wanted. So what tempered her when they were no longer together was her faith that he remembered the same thing, or something different but equally unique.

Salt and oil are preservatives but sugar grows old; it ferments. It crystallizes, it crusts, it dissolves. This both worried and gladdened her. She wouldn’t have trusted a smell that promised to last forever unchanged. The frailty of the sweetness reassured her that it was real. It waxed and waned, for some months it was gone altogether and she felt like she was talking to a different person. But it returned when they both realized that they were unwilling to learn what life was like without it.

The sweetness grew cloying, sometimes, and produced a stupefying lethargy that kept them in bed all day with their kneecaps overlapping.

On the day he told her he loved her, when their bodies were intertwined on an orange couch in the garage of a house that she would one day live in, she replied that she knew, she could tell. She had smelled it. It was warm that day, on the couch in the garage, and the air, the air was soft and sweet.

————

For old love. October 2012.