I get attached to things quickly and I’ve concluded that it has a lot to do with smell. I’m pretty sure this is why a younger me wore a green fuzzy jumper for three weeks straight, didn’t take it off, not even for bed. Fresh laundry smell didn’t sit right on me.

I don’t believe that you can smell your own true scent. The closest you can get, I reckon, is the smell of your unwashed bed and the things that you keep in it. Do my unwashed bedsheets smell like my skin? This is not the kind of question you can throw at an acquaintance, so I had to fall in love to ask it.

There’s a lot of questions you can ask when you’re in love. For example, asparagus-wee, I’ve never smelt it before - will you smell my wee and tell me if it stinks? Another un-smellable odour, since you have to have the right gene for that.

He had several breath-smells. Not all of them were good, but my favourite one was enough to put up with the worst. My favourite appeared at no particular time of day, happened very randomly and unpredictably, and I drank it up urgently because I wanted to hold onto it.

I’d kept him in my bed for longer than anything else I’d kept in there. This became a worry. I couldn’t ask him if my bedsheets smelled like my skin anymore because they were his bedsheets too. If his bedsheets were my bedsheets did we smell the same?

Have we sacrificed our true scents for a new mingled one that neither of us could grasp? This was sad because I’d killed his true smell. We needed to find another person to fall in love with so we could ask, our new-true-mingled-smell, what’s it like?

I wonder what planet Earth smells like and what kind of entities would need to fall in love for us to find out.