Inhale the day.

It stinks of wastage.

Midmorning bed tangles smell like pillow and cosy blankets, spiced with a teasing lateness. You’re once again late, but for nothing in particular, except life in general.

The absence of a clear and logical approach to the day has a very particular fragrance, it smells of rambling bambling bumbling through the house. Picking up socks, putting down mugs, chewing toast, pressing play, shuffling papers. Much like the smell of dust it tugs at your nose hairs until you sneeze, Ah-choo.

The smell of avoidance floats through you head as you spray and wipe to clean out your brain. Dusting off the shelves, rearranging files... even as I close my eyes and turn the music up, tickling my nose is that scent, the insipid odour of wasting time.

It smells worse than the lady who crosses my path looking like a bottle of beer, all hips and fat neck and smelling like a cigarette packet. I, engaging in random acts of consumption, trace the smell of donuts to its source. The scent of a fake shopping mission billows after me and mingles with the sweat of other-peoples-productivity to only vaguely disguise idle spending.

The afternoon is heavy with the off putting aroma of regret and guilt and soon, the smell of a wasted day festers and simmers into the stench of a whole week that reeks sour of idleness and procrastination. The distinctly nauseating scent of failing no one but yourself burns as it rises through your nostrils. It causes a trickling, stinging nose bleed that masks the smell of holidays and chases away the light airy fragrance of a casual summers evening, leaving you sniffing, snorting, smelling blood.