Tv static.

Okay, I know tv static doesn’t have a smell, but I’m certain that people would know what I’m talking about if I was to tell them that silence smells like Tv static. Or perhaps minerals in the water. They’re all the same thing, really.

Or maybe silence smells like a bad conversation at dinner where your mother tell you she’s leaving. Maybe silence has the same smell as my mother’s perfume when she left. No words left behind, the walls absorbing every last sound she ever made, the world opening up to her and what she has to say.

Maybe silence smells like the same Tv static I stared into as I heard the door open, no goodbyes left behind.

“Joanne?” Fiona calls my name, and I snap out of it too fast to not pretend I was deep in thought about my unrelated family trauma.

“I guess it would smell like the forest,” I force a smile, and know that I have to continue when she says nothing. “I mean, I guess the forest is the most silent place yet, don’t you think? When we look for a peaceful, calm place to go where we can get some quiet, most people instantly think of the forest.”

“Or a beach,” Fiona clicks her fingers. I nod.

“Or a beach,” I nod. “So maybe it smells like moss and sand.”

“I like that one,” she scribbles on her notebook fast. “I’m putting that one down for sure.”

I nod again and try not to fall back into the pit of self guilt that threatens to eat me alive at the first thought of my family members and instead spend the rest of the afternoon focusing on my own philosophy assignment. I am almost ashamed to say that it taked me very little to finish up my paper, since I have that small advantage that my therapist likes to call _childhool trauma, _while my best friend _I was raised in Beverly Hills and have two loving parents _Fiona is still stuck on the second question.

“Are you done?” She looks at my laptop and then me, her hair very badly contained in a clump on her head by a scrunchie that has certainly seen better days. Just because she grew up in Beverly Hills, she let mw know as soon as we met, doesn’t mean that she shouldn’t be a cheapskate.

_My parents might be rich, but I most certainly am not. And they’re not dying anytime soon._

__

Her words, not mine. I don’t remember a single day spent apart after that. Or how I ever lived without her triple shot caramel macchiato, two pumps of hazelnut and five vanilla with whipped cream and pumpkin spice order not engraved in my mind for our morning run to the coffee shop. Seriously, I love her.

And that’s why I say “I am. Do you need help?”

And because she loves me, she almost gets teary and nods too quickly for it to be humanly possible. After that, she shows me her laptop and we spend the rest of the night working on her essay.

No mothers to think about.

No silence to smell for miles.