Might You Know a Place by the Way it Smells?

By Kirsten, Year 9

After Sydney Smells Like

Might you know a place by the way it smells?

It’s lovely having a place so dear to you that you can recognise its smell, isn’t it?

Bookstores smell like buttery croissants and caramel biscuits. It smells like fulfilling sadness, empty joy and blissful anger. Like Sylvia Plath, Jane Austen and Vladimir Nabokov. Like sonnets full of love. Like a deceased dove. Like strawberry and lilac scents mixed with the sound of murmured sweet-nothings on tousled bedsheets.

Close your eyes and breathe it all in.

What do you smell?

It smells like bubbles of emotion. Love disguised by lust. Manipulation hidden by a mask of adoration. Greed being mistaken for passion.

It smells like yearning. Hatred. Sadness. Love.

Like coffee. Croissants. Caramel.

Like stories untold.