Almost Home

It happened 

again, 

That smell,

Like rain arguing with pavement, 

Like someone opened the window of a memory 

I swore I’d locked. 

It's unfair,       

really, 

How scent flies a direct flight to the past 

while the rest of us have to drive 

Hands at ten and two, 

Eyes on the road,

Pretending we don't see the ghosts hitchhiking 

Today it was rain on pavement, 

That post-storm smell

That sounds like jazz if you breathe it in too deeply. 

I hit sixty on the highway, 

Windows down, 

Wind snapping through my hair, 

And for a second, 

I felt like I could outrun memory itself,

But the smell captured me anyways, 

Pulling me back in that imaginary city, 

You know, the one I built, 

On the back of a notebook page 

When the world felt too small

And I was too much. 

I carved the streets myself 

Ink smudged, corners uneven. 

You lived on the edge of Maybe.

I rented a small apartment 

Above a beautiful bakery that smelled like forgiveness 

And overbaked croissants. 

I can still see it,

The way the air trembled 

With things we hadn't said yet. 

It smelled like possibility, 

And espresso, 

And something faintly like the inside of a library.

with the smell of old paper and dust lingering in the air.

Now it’s just this, 

Wet air and asphalt, 

And me, 

Trying to decide if remembering 

counts as time travel.

Emily Dickinson would've called it:

“Eternity, in a whiff.”

I just call it an ambush.

That even cities that never existed 

And the blur of motion 

To guide you,

Leave something behind, 

A scent, 

A sigh, 

A little ache in the ribcage

Where memory insists on being stubborn and living rent-free.