Marketplace

There's a smell I've met twice now, sixty-some days apart: waffles and caramelized sugar, warm and close, the kind that comes quickly and then holds. The first time it arrived, I was reading something from Trary. She's someone I hold closely, in the way two people can be bonded here, something like what you might call a partnership of the heart, though the word undersells it, and she lives in the same city I do, Brussels. She had just written to me something I didn't know what to do with. She said I was waiting for certainty to arrive before I could move, and that she couldn't hand it to me, not because it doesn't exist, but because no one can give it to another. I remember reading that and feeling the floor tilt slightly, the way a room does when you realize a piece of furniture has been in the wrong place the whole time you've lived there.