Lyric

A crack of autumn slips inside

Warm as the very first hello

Windows flicker, stations slide

Every blur exhales our name

Your breath once fogged this glass;

A smile too thin to last

After-bell hush along the rail

Your shoulder found a home

No calendar could keep that shade;

Only silence drew it clear

Tonight this city, it smells like us—

Wet asphalt, coffee on my sleeve

Vinyl hiss in a hidden booth

Homework fading into dust

Say it now before it rusts—

It smells like us, it smells like us

Chalk-dust air tangled in hair

Paper stars still wet with ink

We passed grape juice under lights

Played house in the midnight park

You shaped my name like first-day letters

I laughed so I would not confess

Even your goodbye smelled of light—

September breathing through my chest

I should not know it, but I do—

The lamplight you sit in, the tune you hum

There were nights I would borrow your heart

Just to feel it beat with me

You still like me, do not you?

You can not say “liked,” can you?

Your kindness cut me paper-thin

Made me feel like fragile glass

Your scent drifts further away

My fragile sense of smell decays

And every time I thought, “just for now,”

The moment never stayed

When the late bus opened wide

I checked if the song was yours again

I never hated you being romantic—

I just never learned to hold it right

So I sang the only way I knew:

“Smells like us.” Maybe that was all

If I can give you anything tonight

It is thinner than breath yet still alive:

“Yes—now, before, and all the way—

It always, always smells like you.”

And if I breathe out finally

It may—just maybe—smell like me

If you breathe in where we began

It still, somehow, smells like we

Then all at once the doors exhale—

The whole September on our side

And if my voice should break tonight

Let the silence carry what I mean

Call and answer, all of us—

It smells like us… it smells like us…

…it smells like us