Lingering Love

I’ve always wondered what comes first, the love we feel for a person or the love of their scent. The two at some point become inexorably linked and therefore it is difficult to discern which one provoked the other. Maybe all emotions are chemically driven, in which case love and the memories attached to it are propelled by olfactory sequences completely out of our control.

Elias had a distinct smell of sweetness; not of fresh and fragrant flowers but of perfectly ripe fruit. It was a delicate yet opaque scent that left a trail. But then again, that indulgent sense of lingering might have been the result of my love for him. It was a love that required and requested affection. I would always kiss him on his shoulder when we hugged, and it was during these moments where I’d get the strongest trace of his scent that I felt the deepest indication of my love.

On warm summer days we’d sit under the pear tree in his mother’s garden, seduced by the heat and comforted by the shade of nature’s humble carrier of sweets. The grass was wild and soft, but when we’d get up, it always left Elias itchy and he would curse the tiny little green swords. We’d lay on the grass for hours, talking sometimes but not ever feeling the need to. The birds chirped enough for all of us. Before we’d lay down, Elias would carefully select two fallen pears for us to enjoy under its bearer. The voluptuous fruits were weighty with honeyed juice; he always found the perfect pears. He would press his finger at the top of the pear where the stem meets the fruit, trying to find one with the right amount of yield. Then he would check the rest of the fruit’s flesh for signs of softness, because that would indicate over ripeness.

“In the end, we must all be like the perfect pear—only show your softness to those who make an effort to find it,” Elias would say joyfully every time he found a perfect pear.

He always ate his pears with the impatience of a child, completely oblivious to the juice running down his chin and knuckles. It annoyed me how quickly he ate and the way he scanned the pear with his eyes, planning his next bite with a mouth still full of fruit. He would always wipe his face and chin with his clean yet always wrinkly t-shirt. Sometimes I wondered if Elias smelled the way he did because of all the pears he ate and nectar that permeated his skin. Maybe he smelled of the perfect pear.

During one of our long afternoons in the garden, Elias told me his mother was selling the house and moving back home to Morocco at the end of the summer. He was worried that after all those years away, she would feel like a familiar stranger in her own country. He tried to get her to stay but she was adamant that her soul belonged where it had begun.

“I can’t imagine another family living here, sharing their lives in a place that my memories own. It’s ridiculous I know, but I can’t help it. I can’t help how I feel.” His throat tensed at the thought of saying goodbye to the house, and he was worried that with time his memories of being there would fade.

He loved the way the house smelled and I did too. Though he couldn’t quite pin point the fragrance notes, I always thought it smelled of olive oil, cinnamon and Castile soap. On Fridays, the scent of yeast and fresh mint permeated the hallway that led into the kitchen, where the smells were even stronger, almost enveloping. His mother always made tea and bread on Fridays and Elias enjoyed sitting at the kitchen table with her as she malaxed the dough.

We spent one last afternoon under the canopy of the pear tree before they handed over the vacant house, where the empty walls carried the staining patterns of a pre-loved home. We lay on the grass and covered our bodies with shade one last time. The air was thick and sweet and we both felt the enormous weight of this moment, and the melancholy that was heavying both our hearts.

Maybe it was the fact that time was turning a page on this chapter in our lives, or maybe it was the way that we had laid in that very spot so many times that the soil must have imprinted our shapes, but I felt at that moment that I was already living in a memory driven by a fifth sense, induced by the smell of soft fruit and lingering love.