Author: Rosa May M. Bayuga

It was one of those days when she thought she had a great sense of smell. Freshly-baked bread, raindrops, laughter, screams and wounds and hurts, she could smell them all. She could smell the smoke from the pyre of fallen leaves that her father poked with a stick in the backyard of her childhood home. She could smell the flowers whose names she didn’t know from the byways and alleys and side streets and dirt roads she had ever walked on. She could smell shadows and sunbeams, failures, and forsaken dreams.

There was something funereal about the smell that came to her that day. It was a mix of melting candles, incense, and heady blooms, a certain scent that belonged to places of eternal rest. And the sad thing was that she couldn’t place where it was coming from. She looked around the room, opened doors, peeped at corners, even went outside to her little pocket of a garden to find out if there was something there. But she found nothing … nothing.

A sudden stab of pain coursed from her left chest, spread to her back, went up her neck, and traced a path through her breasts. Then and only then did she notice it, a-pouring and a-leaking, a-begging and a-mourning from deep within her. Tears, it was the smell of tears, long pent-up, long forgotten, tears that burned in pyres, tears that watered wild flowers in alleys and byways, tears of shadows and sunbeams, of screams and forsaken dreams.

She gathered the tears as offerings, and laid them, quietly and carefully laid them, before the tomb of her broken heart.