A Loss of Smell

A Loss of Smell

Pandemic Fridays lack the maskless runner, the families on park-bench picnics, the boy who
shifts the air with his baseball bat. Furloughed these hours, I don't need to cross the street. An
afternoon walk along the Potomac is humanless. Beyond the fish slaps and bobbing wood: the
White House. An hour on the dock and then an hour of therapy.

Don't pray to DC to help us, the therapist advises. She is in her home in Pittsburgh with family
photos behind her. I’m on my living room floor, back against the bottom of my couch and legs
folded against the coffee table. I used to sit in her office, both of us able to look out the same
window to comment on the weather.

The fox symbolizes adaptability. One is there when I look up from washing dishes and when I
stare below at the alley while on my stationary bike. If it were normal, I’d trace my new city
through local foods and shops and reading spots. Foxes prefer aloneness as they spend their days
hunting and sleeping. Before I’d never seen one in the wild. Now I see at least two a week.

This state is new. This apartment is new. This job is new. This woman is new. I'm estranged from
my immediate family, the woman shares during our date on the computer. She then asks about the
Yankees, and I tell her this was my grandpa's shirt. To unremember family, I joke, Are you a
secret agent? The government banned her from giving out details about her duties, so I pry with
ridiculousness until she has to get ready for work. Night, and then I shower off the powder I
pressed into the dark under my eyes.

A friend from my old state calls me after I brush my teeth and close the blinds. We compare our
notes from our therapists. The decided conclusion is that we need to find an outlet for our anger
toward those who fearlessly hug family and friends. Our anger is coated in jealousy as we
contemplate the one person who will carry on with no mask, no vaccine, and not contract it.

I didn’t want a Pittsburgh woman. I wanted new dance floors and new noise. I bought a little car
and shipped a bed-in-a-box to Alexandria. Everything shut down the day after I arrived. I close
my eyes this night and dance with music so loud my downstairs neighbor doesn’t even hear the
stomps. A smile comes as if her hand has found my hip and she knows the song too and drinks
spill without notice and the sweat of her neck meets my lips.

Breathless people are safe. I push my blanket under my neck and clench to my last thoughts. If I
were allowed to have visitors, the only place I’d know to take them is the cemetery. Here’s the
best bench under a tree, here’s the oldest one and there’s the youngest, here’s the path with the
least geese poop. Third grave on the right, adjacent to the road, belongs to the female stranger.
Her stone begins, To the memory of a Female Stranger whose mortal sufferings terminated on
the 14th day of October 1816 aged 23 years and 8 months. This stone was placed here by her
disconsolate Husband in whose arms she sighed out her latest breath and who under God did his
utmost even to soothe the cold dead ear of death. I turn my body to the other side of the bed. She
died right after she arrived by ship. A new location, a lost identity.