::Sniff::

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.

8 comments

  1. OMG, i find my under­wear is miss­ing too (panties)… but i always assume that one of my gay friends may also be a cross­dress­er (under­neath the Abercrombie & Fitch!) Cali

  2. I rarely wear per­fume, but am par­tial to body spray. I went through high school with­out wear­ing much except on days I had phys­i­cal edu­ca­tion.

  3. Sometimes, pets drag off the under­wear or socks. They like the way that we smell, too! ;^)

  4. Wow I like your insight on stuff…also I have this under­wear prob­lem too. It may be a conspiriacy…thanks for check­ing out my site, i’m gonna make yours a fre­quent visit…really inter­est­ing stuff going on here.

  5. I lose under­wear all the time.Socks too.

  6. I’m a clean soap and water girl myself. As long as hub­by main­tains good hygeine (which nor­mal­ly he does) I love his nat­ur­al smells. Very inter­est­ing insight.

  7. Classical con­di­tion­ing eh?

    I’m not sure what I smell like =(
    I don’t use per­fume or scents, but the show­er stuffs i like to use are usu­al­ly fruity scent­ed.

    I once was told I smell like baby pow­der, but that may have been due to the fact that my lit­tle sis­ter was just a baby at the time.

  8. @Sammi — I have no idea what I smell like either. I think we’re just too used to our own body scents, that we can’t smell them any­more. Maybe if we lost our sense of smell for a week and regained it, we could smell our­selves.

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