I keep a collection of vintage fragrances hidden away in drawers — bottles from the 1980s and 1990s that seem to hold their breath in the dark. I seldom touch them, yet I cannot bear to let them go. They feel less like objects and more like fragments that have slipped into an afterlife, familiar but no longer belonging to my world. Whenever I think of opening one, I sense the eerie autonomy of the past — how something once ordinary can become mournful and faintly threatening simply by surviving beyond its time.

A fragrance from that era does not summon a simple memory; it resurrects an entire atmosphere. One breath would bring back a decade with startling precision: the colours, the confidence, the textures of a vanished social world. And yet that world would return without context, stripped of the life that once animated it. It would feel like viewing an old mall through degraded film stock — recognisable, but ghostly; intimate, yet hollowed out. These scents carry the residue of human presence, but none of the presence itself. That absence unsettles me more deeply than I like to admit.

There is something profoundly uncanny about the recent past, especially when it returns through objects that should have remained fixed in memory. The bottles in my drawers seem almost familiar but just out of reach, as if they belong to a timeline I no longer inhabit. They have slipped free of the era that created them and now exist on their own, adrift, exerting a quiet pressure on the present. Their very survival feels like a small act of defiance, as though the past has developed its own momentum. I don’t remember them so much as feel them watching, waiting — alive in ways I can’t fully explain.

That is why I keep them sealed away. In ordinary remembering, I summon the past; but with these fragrances, it feels as though the past would summon me. One scent could pull me into a sense of déjà vu mixed with grief, presenting a version of myself I can no longer reach. The reversal of control is the truly sinister part: something inert — glass, liquid, a label — seems capable of acting on me. These bottles hold no narrative, no explanation, only traces of life without the life itself. They feel slightly malevolent not because they threaten harm, but because they remind me how thoroughly time can erase meaning while leaving the evidence intact.

And yet I cannot discard them. Their presence is unsettling, but their absence would feel like erasing an entire section of my own history. So they remain in the drawers, patient and self-possessed, like ghosts caught between worlds. Sometimes I open the drawer a fraction and glimpse a faded cap or the darkening of vintage juice, and the air seems to tighten. It is as if these fragments of the past still breathe in their own strange way — out of time, out of context, and utterly beyond my control.