This Is What First Love Smells Like

It smells like spring. At first sight.
Like roads reek during your early morning jog; of serenity and freedom.
Like a two-month old infant; of hope and birth.

Your first conversation?
A little like sun-kissed beaches smell on a lazy Friday evening; raw and saline, but the salinity which tickles your gut, not wrenches it.
Somewhat like vanilla ice cream cones under an October sky; chilling but delicious.

Your nostrils can tell this fragrance from odor and smoke; it’s been some months now.
Its smells like the sweat dripping from your basketball jersey after a long match;
Or like the bicycles do when rode at the speed of romance; of grease and unwashed socks.
Of all the wilderness and youth and intensity.

Wildness instead of wilderness then; Of spilt ink on carelessly written letters,
Of college’s vacant staircases, chaos and calmness blended.
Of strawberry lip-gloss and half-shaven beards.
The first kiss.

Of broken key-rings, and dried tears stuck at our cheeks;
That first fight;
Of wasted muffins, and noisy monsoons.
Stale and gritty like long vacations.
Asphyxiating like passive smoking.

And eventually the smell becomes familiar and indistinguishable.
Like pages of our old personal diary we now find compulsive to fill.
Like long-opened soda bottles which aren’t carbonated anymore.
Like footsteps. Like vacuum.

Slowly you forget the smell.

And the next time you sense this fragrance, it seems new and fresh.
Like spring.
And every love, is first love again.