I think it was about a month into dating my betrothed that I first turned to them and said, “You smell hungry, want to get some lunch?”
“I what? I smell hungry?”
“Yeah, like, the empty smell. Aren’t you hungry?”
They were, but it was hard for them to accept smelling a state of being. After a few weeks of me pointing it out right before they realized it themself though they asked, “What does hunger smell like?”
“Bad.”
“That’s not helpful.”
“It’s like… an emptiness that goes past the mouth? Bad breath is more upfront but hunger is like you’re smelling stomach acid, it’s all the way from an empty belly.”
They started smelling my mouth in exaggerated silly fashion but eventually they did start to recognize it.
They’re now very smug when they get to use the skill back at me and inform me that I’m hungry.
What does that mean!!!
Sheets, I mean this in the NICEST way possible:
Your writing style perfectly encapsulates the Tumblr vernacular and style about just posting about a thing where context may or may not reveal itself as you read the post. Your posts do that, and then as you get about the halfway point, it turns ever so slightly left into the uncanny valley, so that by the end, the reader is simultaneously confident that they just read a piece of surrealist fiction, and yet intrigued by it.
I myself finished reading this, and was at the same time going ‘that’s not a thing’ and ‘I wonder if I get really close to my partner, if I could smell his hunger’. And then in classic tumblr fashion, I scroll back up to see OP, and once again, it’s @foldingfittedsheets.
There’s another tumblr user I follow who’s similar, but slightly different, called @seat-safety-switch . The surrealist vibe definitely makes you wonder if these posts crossed over from social media in another universe where things are juuust slightly to the left. In this case, a universe where hunger has a scent.
It’s real, I live your world, I walk under the same yellow sun and breathe the same air.
But also you should look at the notes to see what else people can smell because the list is like: ants, blood sugar, pregnancy, and getting sick. It makes me look like less of an odd little creature if you see other people do it too!
