Just as the scent after the rain has a name, I wish the morning without you had one too
Did you know that the scent after the rain has a name?
It is called petrichor.
It is that nostalgic scent that rises when rain falls on dry ground. Two scientists named it in 1964. This means that for a long time before that, humanity knew that scent but had no name for it.
Something everyone knows, yet no one could name. There are surprisingly many such things in the world.
For example, I think.
The first morning after someone you have been with for a long time is gone.
That still has no name.
I remember that morning well.
The world was surprisingly ordinary. Light entered through the gap in the curtains, sparrows chirped outside, and the newspaper delivery bike rode away.
Everything was as usual, except for one single point.
And that one point changed the composition of the air throughout the room.
To call it sad is too crude. Lonely is not enough. Loss is too stiff. Even if I lined up all the words I have, none of them could reach the scent of that morning.
Emotions without names are difficult to handle.
Things you cannot name cannot be put on a shelf. So we carry them around, wandering through our homes for months, sometimes even years.
But recently, I have been thinking this.
The true nature of petrichor does not seem to be the scent of the rain itself. It is the oil that dry soil and stones have stored up during a long dry spell, released into the air when struck by rain. In other words, it is the scent of what the ground has been holding onto all along.
The rain is merely the trigger that calls it forth.
If that is the case, the scent of that morning might be the same. It was not the scent of absence, but the scent of everything I had stored up over those long days, all rising at once when struck by the rain of your departure.
The coffee we drank together, the silly arguments, the evening chimes, the tapes we listened to in the car. That much had soaked into the dry ground.
Nothing rises from ground that has nothing soaked into it.
Thinking of it that way, that nameless emotion is like a certificate of richness. Because the amount of pain is the amount of what had soaked in.
Someday, someone will give it a name. Just like in 1964.
Until then, we can just live with that scent, nameless. The rain will eventually stop. This is not a metaphor, but a meteorological fact.
And from the ground after the rain, comes the most nostalgic scent in the world.
※Petrichor: First appeared in the scientific journal 'Nature' in 1964, named by two scientists, Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Thomas, from the Australian research organization CSIRO.
#LifeSeenFromDailyLifeSeries
#LifeIsInterestingBecauseOfThisSeries
#CreativeAward2026 #EssayCategory
#Audiobook #ListeningReading #ReadingAloud #Recitation #EarActivity