Getting Over People. 

What can I possibly tell anyone about it that hasn't already been told? So I'm not even going to try. Only, I thought for a long long time that you never get over people. But now that I am some years smarter, or so I would like to believe, I know that the 'getting over' bit is hardly the pain; 

it's the 'getting rid' bit. Isn't it true? 

You just can't get rid of people; long after you're over them, they'd still somehow always find a way back into your life from time to time and cause turmoils: happy and/or sad.

And no. I just don't mean the conventional hetero/homosexual relationships. Even with friends. And foes.

Also, is it just me or is the whole 'Friends With Benefits' rubbish almost always 'Not Friends Only Benefits'? Like, after years of believing that what you have is special and cooler than what most might have because you're so comfortable with one another in more ways than one, you find out that when you meet with your clothes on, you don't have jackshit to say to each other. You're Not Friends. You just liked to believe you were. I'm not to say if that's a good thing or bad. I'm just saying it might happen. 

It happens.

But that's hardly the point. The point, if at all there is one, is that of smell. The fragrance. 

I don't do it a lot but I associate most people from my childhood with their distinctive smells. Even my father, for that matter. When I was as high as his knees, I would go to his clinic room with my dirty bare feet just to annoy him; ever so lovingly back then, of course. And then he'd lift me in his strong 'daddy arms' and wash my dirty feet in the sink while making lame jokes in Bengali. I remember how the room smelled. And he.
Childhood is an awkward period, if you ask me. You end up remembering strange things.

The smell stays.

Growing up, I ran around happily with my red-painted nails, going off to places I wasn't supposed to be in, flaunting my cargo pants in front of people I wasn't supposed to meet and secretly smoking substances I wasn't supposed to know about. And that's when I met him. And then began the  most-fucked-up-relationship in the history of the most-fucked-up-relationships. All is almost gone now even in memory; all but the memory of his smell. His own smell- of his skin- that I remember distinctively from back in the day when he'd cuddle me, to say the least. It's not gone; the smell. It's changed.

I wouldn't recognize him in the dark.

So we just keep the lights on now. 

It's more fun that way.