and here you are

Smell is my favorite sense. Smell like nothing else elicits taste, touch, vision, carries me to a particular moment.

I close my eyes and smell a lilac bush and I am 16 again, standing beside Maren and Sarinda, watching Elliot play with Jonathan. Maren, 3 years old, has freckles across her nose and streaks of light in her hair that glisten like the waves of Lake Wononscopomuc on a September morning. She holds a small doll in her left hand—blue eyes, grapefruit lips. Her voice, the voice of a child I have not spoken with in ten years, comes back to me. This smell of lilac floods me with other smells—the grass on the golf course, Maren’s shampoo, a freshly painted door to the chapel.

Maren, 3 years old, is alive in this lilac scent. Alive here in a way she is not otherwise in my memory. Ask me to describe the Maren I knew in 1998, I will, without hesitation, produce a catalog of half-true descriptive phrases, the essence of the girl, but not the girl herself. Yet, here in lilac is Maren, whole.

So it is this morning, as I lay here in bed and a scent—some strange disembodied scent— hits and fills my lungs, fills me with the being of someone faraway. (You.) I lay not thinking in absence, but feeling the presence. Sense builds on sense constructing, out of the abstraction of my memory, a form. Then suddenly: here, here, not there, but here you are beside me...