Smelling the people you love

Everyone tells you food comes back, and food does come back. Coffee gets complicated again. Fruit is almost startling. But that is not where the return of your sense of smell actually lands hardest. It lands on people. The top of a child's head after a bath. The back of a spouse's neck. The particular air of the house you grew up in, which you would know blindfolded and could not describe to another person if you tried. Those are the ones that stop you where you are standing.

You did not know you were missing that. Food you knew about, because you noticed things tasting flat and said so. But nobody warns you that the people you love have a smell you have been unable to reach for years. It is one of the oldest ways a person knows they are home, older than language, older than anything you could put words around. Years of smoking took it so gradually that you never filed a complaint about it. Then it comes back, and it comes back nearly all at once.

It is worth sitting with what that implies. Something was taken from you that you could not even name as missing, which raises a fair question about what else has been quietly handed back while you were watching the calendar instead. You have been getting things returned in categories you never thought to check on. God builds a body that repairs itself the moment you stop interfering with the work. Most of that repair never sends you a notification. This one did, and you felt it.

So do it on purpose today. Find the person, and instead of the ordinary two second hug, stay a moment longer and actually breathe them in. Nobody around you has to know what you are doing. It will take four seconds and you will remember it longer than almost anything else that happens today. Then say thank you, quietly, for a sense you did not know you had lost. This is what you were getting free for. Not the statistics, not the counter. This.