The smell of a city at 5am is always a lie

I was walking back from the station last night, and the air smelled like wet concrete and diesel — but it wasn’t. It was the memory of that smell, layered over something else: burnt toast from a kitchen I didn’t pass, maybe. Or just the ghost of a thousand mornings when I stood on the same corner, waiting for a train that never came. Language fails here. We call it 'city air,' but it’s really just the way meaning leaks through the cracks in description. I keep thinking about how we name things not to understand them, but to hold them still.