The smell that left before i did

Written in Ayvalik, November 2023. Typed up today.

The woman at the laundry folded my sheet into a tight square and held it to her face before passing it across the counter. She said something I didn’t catch. I think it was about the smell.

This was Ayvalik, in a house above a row of workshops where they pressed olives through the night. The presses ran from late October. By the time I arrived the whole street had taken on the smell, and so had everything I owned.

The coat I’d brought with me absorbed it first. Then the sheets, then the notebook. I’d hang the coat on the chair and by morning the chair smelled of it too. Green and heavy. The kind of smell that sits in fabric the way smoke does, except this one you didn’t want to lose.

I wrote in the notebook each evening, mostly about small things I’d seen at the market crates down the hill. The ink sometimes smudged because my fingers were oily. I never worked out whether it was the air or my own hands.

Around the third week I realised I couldn’t smell it anymore. The sheets, the coat, the room. I pressed my face into the collar and there was only fabric. A man at the press who let me watch one afternoon laughed when I said I missed it. He waved his hand in front of his nose. He said he stopped smelling it years ago.

I was sorry about that later. Not right away. On the bus out of town I pulled the coat around me and there was just the faintest trace. I held the collar close for a while.

Then nothing. I kept the coat folded in the bottom of the backpack after that. I thought maybe the smell would come back if I didn’t air it. It didn’t.

That’s all I wrote down.