your scents make you

like a sweater laden with the aroma baked cookies,
and the faint hint of your friend's cologne
it is a comfort, hanging on your shoulders

or a sweet girl's perfume
that smells of chamomile and honey
her naive innocence
it is rich, the way it invades your nose

the boy you love
who smells like warmth if it could be bottled up
sweet and sour at the same time,
some drugstore body spray he uses
and yet it reminds you of evenings spent with him,
clinging onto your clothes,
or when some stranger wearing it walks past

even your own smell
beneath this manufactured, manicured
version of you,
is not lost on his skin
or his bedsheets

like the vanilla you used to lather on your skin,
mature and yet demure in its subtle sweetness;
still, your skin tasted of sweat and lust and
you

tell me, what do you smell like?
the clothes that sit in a laundry basket
for a few days,
the candle that burns in your room

i don't know

ask your friends;
they tell you it's a spicy scent;
a medical undertone;
it doesn't even stand out;

here you are,
defining the tang of a boy’s sweat
and what does yours mean to anyone?
nothings, perhaps

and it doesn’t sit well with you;
so you stand in aisles of perfume,
a crowded, over-priced store,
deciding who you want to be

the comforting cookies,
the innocent cup of tea,
it doesn’t even matter
you buy the prettiest bottle,
in lotions, in perfumes, in shower gels
a signature smell, you tell yourself,
maybe will make you make sense

you drench your skin in it for weeks
but you lose the lotion,
you forget to spray the perfume on in the morning,
run out and can’t find the same scent anymore

you borrow your beautiful friend’s perfume for a day
and it reminds you of her
the soft angles of her smile, her mermaid hair
you feel pretty

then it wears off when you get home
and you’re left with
medical, spicy nothing; what does that even mean?

what does it mean
to not know what your own body smells like?
to only have others' smells cling to you
is both a privilege and a hindrance

i am marked by lovers and friends
i have patches of skin that smell like certain boys
but does that not make the skin theirs?

your scent makes you, but i don’t have one.