It started with just a whiff.
A fragrance, not fragrant but flagrant, repulsive physically. His face peeled back at the catch of it, as if to dodge some flume of poisonous gas. It was foreign entirely; something he had never smelled before, nor anything to the like. It wasn’t even rotten or decayed, but simply morbid entirely - the stench of death.
He smelt it, and kept smelling it, and it followed him, one room to the next, continuing in his mind even when escaping it in the shower, or in the lake, somehow reforming at his first negligence. Whatsoever remained in the smell-scape after sprays of cologne, eau de toilette, exotic ouds, though diminished in form, remained still, growing, like a seed in the desert, finding whatever will to stay, against the will of his own, and growing again, until finally, as a populist rebellion, it overthrew the regime of flavorful and elegant scents to retake the throne of his mind, front and center, yet again.
And this continued for days, weeks, continuing for months, until a year had come, and still as strong as the first day, he could smell that odor, that malodorous presence, permeating.
Only him, and no one else.
Doctors had no cure for what they couldn’t sense. Cursed by the ages, no mentalist nor shaman nor scientist he encountered could perceive, or perhaps chose not to sense, that stench of death that followed him the entire year, from Jan till now, through one frosty winter, one hallow spring, one reeking summer, and one pallid fall. Now into the second winter, and he swore it would be the last. It was enough.
A day was spent two hours in the shower, two hours in the lake, one more smoking - five cigarettes in the hour, sometimes lit two at a time, to smoke the scent - and eight or nine snoring, usually dreaming of the scent, but still respite from truly feeling it. The rest of his day he spent writing, scribing what once were soft cheerful memoirs of his life in the countryside, but as time went on, descended down a ladder of sorrow, becoming more like dreaded chronologies of tragedy, the world’s suffering, depression, all feelings which would be cast out by the sane were ruminated on by him, and brought to form on paper in black-as-night ink. He wrote and wrote, but the time proceeded to do no kindness to his temperament, and his writing still degraded to insanity, to the abyss of despair. The last thing he wrote, for once not poetry but prose, would be his departing letter to the world, and to life itself.
He decided at last to bid farewell to that putrid, foul, terrifying shawl of hatred that wrapped his nose and mouth, serving as a barrier between him and all happy thoughts and warm essences, suffocating him. Perhaps fitting, he wanted his end to also be a suffocation. In his own form of revenge, he would return the debt of suffocation back unto the scent, drowning it in that lake, allowing it just moments of the suffering he had felt for the last 365 days, before taking it with him to the afterlife.
And so it was, as he wrote and willed, that that man, that writer, wrote his own exit from the play of life, and performed that role to no applause, no laudation, and perhaps even to no one at all, save the grim reaper whose cowl he wore as a make, whose penetrating fragrance he endured as a face, who would finally escort him to a place with no feelings, no suffering, and no scents at all.