Her Perfume

I walked past a stranger in Tesco and nearly dropped my basket. Same perfume.

Her name was Lily. Vanilla and something like rain. I never knew the name of the scent, and I never asked. That's the thing about love. You think you've got forever to learn the details.

We'd been dating a year. I was never the romantic type, but she made me want to be. She'd leave sticky notes in my textbooks. "Pass your exam or I'm dumping you." I kept every single one.

Then she got into a program in Edinburgh. Two hundred miles. She asked me to come. I said I'd think about it.

Thinking took too long.

By the time I said yes, she'd already said goodbye. "I needed you to choose me before I had to ask," she told me. And she was right. I wanted to be asked. She wanted to be chosen.

We were both too proud to just say it.

So now I'm in a supermarket aisle, forty minutes from my own flat, following a stranger's perfume like a ghost. I actually turned around. Actually looked for her.

Of course, it wasn't Lily. Just a woman buying oat milk.

I went home and checked my old textbooks. Found one last sticky note I'd missed.

"Don't let me be the one who leaves first."

She wrote it months before she left.

I should've read it sooner.