Smells Like Copper

Visual Note ⚠️:

[The accompanying image is not my creation. It was sourced from Tumblr and belongs entirely to its original artist. All credit and rights remain with them; its use here is solely for artistic context and not for commercial gain.]

It hits me in the quiet—always the quiet. That metallic scent, sharp and haunting, curling through my nostrils like the ghost of something I tried to bury. Smells like copper. Blood and memory. Regret and iron. It lingers like a warning, like a truth I never wanted to face. The body remembers what the mind tries to forget, and mine… it never lets me forget. Not the sound of her voice breaking. Not the night I walked out. Not the hollow click of the door shutting behind the last part of me that was still worth saving.

I used to think it was just in my head, that smell. A trick of the subconscious. But trauma has a scent—ask anyone who’s ever been close enough to their own ruin. It clings to fabric, to skin, to silence. The same way blood does when you don’t clean the wound properly. The same way guilt does when you try to wash your hands of it.

She once told me, “It smells different when you lie.”

I laughed. She didn’t.

Maybe what she meant was this—that there’s a scent to violence, even the quiet kind. The kind that doesn’t leave bruises but leaves a room aching. The kind that’s done with words unsaid, with presence withdrawn, with promises held like bait. And now every room I enter smells like copper. Like her absence. Like everything I didn’t say until it was far too late.

She once said my silence was a slow form of violence—and maybe that’s what haunts me most. Not the arguments. Not the distance. But the quiet, complicit ways I dismantled something sacred. I used to tell her, “I’m just tired, that’s all,” but exhaustion was never the truth. I was retreating. From confrontation. From her. From the man I pretended to be. I watched love rot in the corners of the room while I numbed myself with noise and novelty—believing distraction could disguise decay. But even lies grow loud eventually. And mine were deafening.

──────────

I drowned my wounds in NyQuil, like anesthesia could silence the sting of guilt I sutured into my own skin. When performance stops being persuasive—and it always does—I close my eyes and vanish into the unlit corridors of my mind, hoping the shadows will shield me from the blinding light of consequence.

I’ve since exorcised the toxins that once dictated my movements. No pills. No smoke. No self-inflicted sabotage.

And yet—

I am drunk.

Intoxicated by guilt & regret.

Reeling from the aftertaste of everything I chose to ignore.

Once again, I failed.

And though my intentions flickered with remnants of sincerity, intentions don’t amend wreckage. They don’t bury the dead or unbreak the broken. All that remains is the aftermath—raw and sobering. The legacy of every moment I should have held on tighter… and didn’t.

I shattered the moment it all came rushing in—not with grace, but with force. The hurt. The trauma. The betrayal. It didn’t knock politely. It split me open, gutted me clean, and left nothing untouched. And in that silence after the collapse, I finally heard the question that undid me: Was this always who I was underneath the polish?

Was cruelty always embedded beneath the surface, waiting for the first crack to bleed through? Even beneath the curated self-awareness I wore like a badge—was the rot always there?

When did I cross that threshold—that blurred border between principle and temptation? At what moment did I betray myself so subtly that I didn’t even notice?

What part of me is so starved for validation that it consumes everything it touches? That devours me from the inside out, clawing at the walls of my ribcage, gnawing at the man I once swore I’d never become?

And always—beneath it all—that scent.

Like a penny between the teeth. Like rust at the back of the throat. Copper. The smell of something broken, left too long unattended.

Now, I walk through the ruins of my own narrative like a ghost—half memory, half punishment. Every recollection is a photograph soaked in rain—bent, blurred, and almost too fragile to hold. I see her in flickers: the way she bit her lip when nervous, the quiet strength in her laughter, the tremble in her voice when she pleaded for presence.

I remember the night she reached for me—not out of love, but desperation—and how I turned away, spellbound by hollow validation, by the counterfeit comfort of admiration from strangers who would forget my name by morning.

God, what was I chasing?

The mirror doesn’t lie like I do. Each morning it delivers the face of a man I no longer recognize—eyes dimmed by shame, jaw locked from sleepless nights and self-interrogation. I trace the reflection like the blueprint of my undoing.

“This isn’t who I meant to be,” I whisper.

But confessions whispered to glass offer no redemption. Repentance, when spoken into an empty room, echoes but never answers.

So I write.

I sit alone with these words, bleeding honesty onto the page, excavating truth from the wreckage. Maybe—just maybe—somewhere between the commas and the pauses, I’ll rediscover the man I buried beneath ego, impulse, and neglect.

But grief has a second voice—one that speaks not of punishment, but of possibility. A whisper, faint at first, then louder:

“You can’t undo the past, but you can outlive it.”

Grief, it turns out, is not a grave. It is soil. And soil remembers. It holds the scent of every root, every drop of rain, every wound once carved into its skin.

There’s a garden behind my building. I tend it now—carefully, consistently. I started with basil. Then rosemary. A peace lily that refused to bloom until I did. I dig into the dirt with bare hands, and sometimes… sometimes the scent returns. Metallic. Faint. Copper. Not like blood this time, but like memory becoming mineral. Like pain transforming into something elemental.

Redemption, I’ve learned, doesn’t arrive with trumpets. It arrives in silence, in the small choices repeated without applause. It’s showing up for yourself when there’s no one left to impress. It’s being kind when no one’s watching. It’s choosing the long road when the shortcut’s too easy. It’s saying no to the part of you that once said yes to your own destruction.

I no longer ask for her forgiveness.

Not because I don’t want it—God knows I do—but because I’ve learned she owes me nothing. Her healing was never mine to witness. My penance is to live better, not to be seen doing so.

Sometimes, late at night, I still dream of her. Not to beg. Not to rewrite the past. But to tell her,

“Thank you for leaving.”

Because in her absence, I met the man I’d never had the courage to become in her presence.