Sorry I Keep Stealing Your Smell

On the scent exploitation crisis, and how I’m not helping.

Sorry I went to college with someone who went on to become a cologne CEO.

Sorry his company had been flailing recently and needed a breakthrough perfume.

Sorry he reached out on LinkedIn and asked if I could help him find a new smell he could sell.

Sorry I sampled your natural aroma without your consent and pitched it to him as a fragrance.

Sorry his company was on such a bad run he was willing to consider such an unlikely pitch.

Sorry he loved how you smell so much that he pitched what I’d pitched to his Board of Directors.

Sorry his Board of Directors responded so positively that they fast-tracked your smell for development.

Sorry they released the fragrance rendered from your natural aroma only a few months later, under the brand name “Abandoned Persuasion.”

Sorry hundreds of thousands of people you’ll never know became able to smell like you overnight.

Sorry for all the twists of fate that led our nation to the point in history where something like that is even possible.

Sorry it is personally painful to you that it is virtually effortless for so many people to smell like you.

Sorry almost all of them are also unlikely to be the kind of people you would like.

Sorry I was paid such a handsome reward in exchange for “discovering” of your smell.

Sorry the CEO chose to dump even more money into the promotion of your smell after realizing how well it was resonating with the kinds of people who aren’t comfortable with how their own bodies smell.

Sorry my royalty payments only surged as the new marketing efforts proved effective.

Sorry I stopped interacting with you after these payments changed my life.

Sorry I never passed along any portion of the proceeds I received.

Sorry you won’t be getting any money out of me, or out of the company, or out of the people who now live in a cloud of the scent previously produced exclusively by your body.

Sorry I’m so cold-blooded about money and always have been since I was a child.

Truly sorry about all the financial and emotional depredations I grew up in the shadow of to make me such a mercenary person.

Sorry about all the cortisol flooding your endocrine system twenty-four-seven because of how angry you are at being uncompensated for the use of a scent that only your body can produce in a natural manner.

Sorry that all that cortisol sloshing through you not only made your life unpleasant, and turned your hair gray, and ruined your immune system, but also literally changed your bodily chemistry, such that you began to produce an entirely new scent.

Sorry the new scent your body made was just enough like “Abandoned Persuasion” to be familiar to fans, while also being different enough, due to the effects of all that cortisol, to smell just a little bit new.

Sorry I conspired to lure you to a public place only to sneak up behind you and discreetly bottle a viable sample of your new natural aroma.

Sorry I didn’t say hello when I did that, nor ask how you were doing.

Sorry you never even knew I was within inches of you, a place I shall never go again.

Sorry you probably smelled me standing behind you, stealing your smell again, but by the time you recognized what you were smelling and turned to see if it was me, I was gone.

Sorry that subsequent to absconding with your scent, I sold it to the same, now extremely successful, cologne CEO, this time commanding an even higher royalty.

Sorry his company released this second fragrance under the brand name “Subzero Vermilion.”

Sorry “Subzero Vermilion” is such a fucking stupid name.

Sorry culture has gotten to the point where the only way for things to exist is at all for them to be aesthetically bankrupt, transgressively banal, or hysterically anti-beautiful.

Sorry whatever was holding in place the old virtues of ethics, aesthetics, and common sense that everyone grew up with and was comforted by is gone forever.

Sorry I never did anything with my life to preserve those virtues, and everything I did do actively accelerated their annihilation.

Sorry I never cared enough to leverage my status as preeminent scent hunter of the modern moment into a position of power within the industry of commercial fragrances, in order to exert any kind of salutary influence over the naming and branding of stolen scents, and of culture in general.

Sorry “Subzero Vermilion” proved even more popular than “Abandoned Persuasion.”

Sorry I was content to simply pass along what I stole to third parties who knew best how to wrench from them maximum dollars.

Sorry your own aromas remain worthless to you while remaining lucrative to so many others.

Sorry you are on a downward spiral in terms of retaining the privacy of how you smell.

Sorry I keep reaching out to apologize for all the ways in which I have so unfeelingly exploited you.

Sorry I can’t stop talking, and feeling, and being in my feelings, about this situation.

Sorry I never change even though I keep apologizing and apologizing and apologizing.

Sorry my apologies seem to have become some kind of pro forma verbal exercise, an almost religious ritual in which the saying of the words by the sayer, me, and the echoes of those words as heard by the person who speaks them, again me, is the only reliquary of meaning.

Sorry that in some way that is difficult to pin down, my perpetual apologies almost recapitulate your original exploitation, if only by repeatedly reminding you of the injustice you have undergone that neither I nor my collaborators in your exploitation will ever take steps to redress.

Sorry that as long as I keep apologizing, the umbrella apology under which all my apologies are couched, remains incomplete and unfinished.

Sorry an unfinished apology effectively blocks the person being apologized to, you in this case, from ever deciding to either forgive or to not forgive the person doing the apologizing

like a rainstorm that never ends yields neither a rainbow nor the absence of a rainbow.