One Grey, Vintage Soft T-Shirt

People always say that it hurts at night
and apparently screaming into your pillow at 3am is the romantic equivalent of being
heartbroken.

But sometimes
it’s 9am on a Tuesday morning
and you’re standing at the kitchen bench waiting for the toast to pop up

And the smell of dusty sunlight and earl gray tea makes you miss him so much
you don’t know what to do with your hands.

― On Missing Them, Rosie Scanlan
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I have one shirt. One grey, vintage soft t-shirt of his that still has his smell. My well-intentioned sister offered to do our laundry before I would fly, sobbing in security lines, to New Jersey to be with his and almost-but-so-tragically-never-to-be-my family. I was absent as I began to pack, behind an aged, puffy face that I didn’t even recognize as my own. I registered only the kindness in the gesture, not its implications. I said, “yes” and “thank you” and could not muster a grateful smile. So, a wash cycle, a rinse cycle, a dryer sheeted tumble dry with my sister’s high-end, hypoallergenic laundry products almost erased the scent of his embrace. How simple it is to disappear after you disappear.

I hiccup sobbed that night when I put on his green shirt with the polar bear on it and realized what I’d consented to—an irreversible smell-icide. I thought back to the laundry I saw her collecting from doorknobs, towels from hooks, socks from corners, and realized I’d lost the smell of my nose buried in his chest as he danced me round the living room, his I-couldn’t-wait-to-get-home-to-you-even-though-I-was-only-gone-an-hour hug, the irresistible shape of his back that made me sidle up behind him and slide my hands up the inside of his shirt and wrap around his abs as I laid my chest against his spine, feeling him smile in his sigh into me.

I went to New Jersey. I wandered his parents’ house in his natal town in slippers they insisted on buying for me, wearing his wrong smelling pajama pants and moving pasta around lovely white plates.

When I returned, I took my wedding dress from its hiding place at my sister’s house and brought it back to our apartment. I took all the flower bouquets and their invasive fragrance out to the porch to die in the late spring snows (shhhh…don’t tell). Then, I let my family leave town without me and lost myself in my grief. Tearing through corners of the house—furiously looking under the bed, behind the desk, on top of the fridge for some piece of him—a difficult task in your tulle’d wedding dress. When finally, I found something.

Behind my shoe rack in the closet, there lay a crumpled grey ball, wrinkled enough to suggest it had already been worn. And I pulled it to my nose, greedy and ravenous, and buried my face in his 8-pack Ivory soap and deodorant with the bro-tastic name we’d made fun of. I consumed the way his skin smelled in the sun, his bike ride home from work and the chicken burritos he ate for lunch. I closed my eyes and melted into him.

Upon realizing that my tears might taint him. I pulled myself away reluctantly, and, with great reverence, took him to the bed, to his pillow and placed him there in a strategic ball to trap all the scents in the folds. In front of the pillow, I placed the box of his ashes. On top of that box, I placed a heart-shaped rock from our sacred grove.

They sit there still, where I curl my body around them every night, as close as possible but not close enough to let my shampoo’d hair or eye cream touch his pillow. I won’t dare use the lavender hemp soap that his aunt sent me for Christmas, or the lotion that he used to say made me smell edible. Those are too strong to be near this treasure. I bury my nose in his shirt once before I sleep every night, refraining from doing it too much otherwise. I don’t know if a dirty shirt has a smell quota, but I am careful nonetheless.

How can this smell bring me so close, so irrefutably close? Close enough that I feel the vise that has cinched my chest for the last 91 days, loosen the tiniest bit. I can draw a breath, never deep enough, but deeper still. And then, within moments, it returns, tighter than before and almost too tight to draw breath for the sobs that wrack my body. It is him and not him. It is close but never close enough.