Only to Find Gideon�s Bible

This is really strange. So, I come home last night and putter around getting ready to do my laundry and I reach down to pick up the shirt from the other night to throw it in with the load. I indulge in a nanosecond of trite sentimentality and hold it to my nose expecting to be engulfed by his smell and momentarily teleported to the idyllic pinhole of time when he leaned over and kissed my neck perfectly, just before we began ecstatically pawing each other and flawlessly executed a drunken transfer from couch to coffee table with the precision positioning of a US supply ship docking at the Russian space station. Anyway, so I hold my shirt to my nose and inhale deeply. Yes, it reeked of cigarette smoke, but beneath that I was sure I�d detect the lingering delectability of his scent. I did not. Do you know what it smelled like? Like a motel room, like a smoking room in the Cheep Sleep Motel when you walk into it on a late August afternoon, dusty and sweaty from the drive on Rt. 23, and the AC hits you with its stale breeze. This is a very specific smell. You would know it if you smelled it and that is exactly what my shirt smelled like. Right after you shut the door on the bright heat of the highway and hear the spitting whir of the AC unit too loudly and take in the dim limits of the room. It is anonymous, stained and faded, and so lonely.