NYC

(Người Yêu Cũ/ex-lover). Rain falls on petals already dried, soft ghosts of a garden that bloomed once and stopped.

At the bottom of a leather bag, a compact of makeup has turned to powder and dust, forgotten there since the last time it mattered. A folded letter, musky and sweet with age, holds ink gone the color of tea. These are the things left behind after love ends — not thrown away, just tucked into corners and drawers, waiting to be found again. Paper softens at the folds. Petals crumble at a touch.

What lingers is the residue of someone who used to be there, carried now by whoever finds these small relics and keeps them a little longer.

• James Nguyen

d.grayi is the work of James Nguyen, known also as Miju, a perfumer who came to scent as an adversary rather than a calling. A career spent around hair color and its chemicals left James allergic. Fragrance meant headaches and a throat swelling shut, and anything scented was avoided outright. Cosmetic chemistry, taken up as a hobby, brought the first turn: cosmetic raw materials that smelled unpleasant, and natural ingredients found to soften them.

Then came a dream, in which someone deeply important who had passed away returned and described a fragrance. It was not a scent so much as a complete story, vivid and pictured, and James woke and wrote down every detail. The quest to recreate it became the studio. Isolated aroma molecules, tried later, provoked nothing; the allergy had been to composition, not to any one material. James now builds olfactive stories unrestricted.