Once, during a terrible year, I fell in love with fragrance. For months, I had drifted in my pain. I was diaphanous. I felt as though I were evaporating. Slowly, tentatively, I began to understand that trauma had separated me from myself. And without knowing why, I began to read about perfumery. The more I encountered other writers’ efforts to convey scent, its ephemerality, the more I wanted to smell these inventions on my own skin. I sampled from tiny vials. I dabbed droplets on my wrist. I tried to find words for each discovery, the sourness of saffron, the heavy marmalade of certain roses, oud like something smoky and animal. And I returned to my body. Slowly, the trauma diminished, and I realized it had changed in much the same way a stick of incense might burn until it becomes a mound of white ash.