My favourite friend and I are both named after flowers. I am a violet and she a lily, despite the little spelling inaccuracies in our given names. When it’s time, I sign her birthday card with the refrain from Viola to Lilly, from one flower to another. We didn’t grow up together – after we met we used to joke that we had the same adolescence but in different places, so similar were our previous experiences – but now we grow with and around each other, two climbers on a sun-drenched terracotta wall. We are both spring children, as she was born in April and I in May. We love the smell of those months, so we try to recreate it with the perfumes that we wear – and this is where she strays away from the natural choice. Lilly always smells of jasmine. There her namesake flower is switched for another, one that – before I met her – brought me the scent of late May mornings in my childhood bedroom in Northern Italy. Back then, when I opened the wooden blinds to let the sunlight in, the perfume of jasmine jumped in as well, an invisible Romeo climbing up from the white-splattered vines that reached my window.

Now jasmine simply reminds me of Lilly, I see her face when I smell the flower. She keeps dry jasmine in a glass jar, to perfume tea or food or just for show, and jasmine is her flower despite her name. I prefer it this way, because lilies smell of graveyard visits in November when I was little, of claustrophobic hallways and cold marble walls and weeping adults, each of them a very unfamiliar thing back then. Lilies are sweet but sharp, as violent as the vertigo of falling, and I’m still not sure I like their scent. I received lilies for my birthday last May, cloud-white, not yet in bloom but just about to be – the flowers of the dead. The person I loved (he didn’t so much) helped me cut the stems and arrange the blossoms into two separate vases, one for each end of the table, one for each of us. One month later I would see him for the last time, and he would cut me out of his life. The lilies had long decayed, but their seeds had left orange stains on the table, a mess that was now only mine to clean. They have remained flowers of burial to me.

Lilly’s perfume overpowers her name and its connotations, in the same way that I find it easier to separate once-familiar faces from their name than to detach them from their perfume. When people leave, they leave their name stained for other people to wear, but mostly they leave their scent to linger in a corner of my mind so that when I encounter it in a new room they will be standing there once again, waving at me, not in flesh but in substance. And the spring flowers in every street are childhood ghosts, shaping into a sweet regretful breeze, telling me that everything that was still is, in the air. Flowers are scents are people are names are flowers, and Lilly is all of them – but, to me, her scent is herself more than her name is.

Lilly in late spring, surrounded by flowers