I swear I’m miss­ing some underwear.

For the longest time, I had enough box­ers to get me through the week at least, but now I find myself hav­ing to do laun­dry before Saturday comes around. I can’t imag­ine any­one actu­ally tak­ing them, although every time I lose an arti­cle of cloth­ing, I always sus­pect the most recent ex-girlfriend first. This isn’t for any spe­cific rea­son (in fact, I’m pretty sure none of them have ever actu­ally taken any­thing), and is prob­a­bly just a para­noia cul­ti­vated through group hug con­fes­sions.

That, and know­ing how impor­tant smell can be to some­one. Ashley, in par­tic­u­lar, used to take my under­shirts on a reg­u­lar basis. She’d tell me to wear them for days (good thing Asian peo­ple don’t sweat), and we’d have a rota­tion thing going on where I’d give her a new (used) shirt when I couldn’t see her for a while. She told me that she’d fall asleep clutch­ing them, although the smell would never last longer than a week.

Michele was dif­fer­ent. She didn’t have any nat­ural scent, and told me that my shirts would never stop smelling like me. I sus­pect that she had a much sharper olfac­tory sense.

Sam I could smell through the pages of a book she once gave me: a copy of Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes. She picked it up at a book sale, and read it in one day. By the end she was cry­ing, and thought I would enjoy it. Every time I turned the page, it was like she was sit­ting in front of me again, cof­fee smell on her breath.

Louise was dif­fer­ent still. She had a great scent that was a lit­tle sweet, under the Cool Water by Davidoff she would fre­quently wear. She didn’t seem to care for my nat­ural body smell as much as the arti­fi­cial “male” scents, such as the Gillette series of prod­ucts. Jacky once told me that she was using a stick of the same sport antiper­spi­rant that her ex used because it reminded her of him. When I actu­ally saw the stick, even already know­ing that it was a stick of “guy antiper­spi­rant”, I was still sur­prised at how male ori­ented the mar­ket­ing was, with high con­trast flu­o­res­cent stripes and bold fonts. It looked a lit­tle odd when she put it on, hold­ing the stick with her dainty hands.

I find that most girls are like this; they pre­fer the man­u­fac­tured smells of an after­shave, body wash, or even deodor­ant. Instead, Ashley taught me to appre­ci­ate an eau de nat­ural. I remem­ber walk­ing up to her house, after not see­ing her for a month, and being able to smell her from out­side the door. I would miss her even more just stand­ing there, almost as if this made her ethe­real pres­ence tan­gi­ble. Ever since, I’ve believed that the scents we pro­duce are more impor­tant than the ones we put on. They’re unique to one per­son, and never go away.

Unlike my underwear.