Breathe in.
Whatever just entered your nose was already in the room. You did not order it. You did not flavor it. It was simply there, and now it is inside you.
There is a smell in the air right now. There always is. Coffee from earlier. The faint dustiness of the room. Something from outside. Something you cannot quite name.
You were not smelling it a moment ago, and it was still happening.
Smell is the sense that does not ask. It enters with the breath. You cannot decide to take a breath without taking what is in the air with it.
The world arrives in you, twelve times a minute, without consultation.
You have been breathing the room your whole life. The room has been entering you. There has never been a wall between you and what surrounds you, only the idea of one.
The breath knows this.
The nose has always known.