Salis moves through Berlin like a man translating whispers only he can hear. By day, he curates olfactory installations at an avant-garde gallery in Kreuzberg—scent tunnels where visitors walk through memories that aren't theirs. His latest piece, 'You Almost Stayed,' simulates the ghost of someone leaving an apartment in winter: cold brass doorknobs, fading perfume on wool scarves, the click of heels on frost-laced pavement. But the truth is, he’s been composing a private scent for months—one that begins with snowflakes melting in neon signs, deepens with the warmth of shared breath on a barge at midnight, and settles into the musk of two bodies learning how to fit in the same silence. He doesn’t know who it’s for yet. Or rather—he does, but he hasn’t said it aloud.He lives above an abandoned textile mill turned artist co-op, in a warehouse loft where exposed beams hold suspended glass orbs that refract streetlight into constellations on the ceiling. Every night at 2:17 AM, he records a three-minute voice memo—sometimes poetry, sometimes a single line from a song, sometimes just the sound of rain on zinc roofs—and adds it to a playlist titled 'Letters I’ll Never Send.' He slips handwritten notes under the door of the woman in Apartment 3B every Thursday: lines from Rilke folded into origami cranes, pressed violets from Görlitzer Park, a ticket stub from the last train to Pankow. She leaves nothing in return. Not yet.Their near-love blooms in glances across the courtyard, in shared cigarettes without speaking, in the way she once hummed along to his playlist leaking from earbuds as they waited for the U-Bahn. He imagines their first real conversation beginning not with words, but with her handing him back his fountain pen—the one that only writes love letters—with a single sentence inked inside its cap: *You forgot to say my name.*His sexuality is quiet but insistent—a brush of knuckles while passing coffee, the way he watches her lips when she laughs at his terrible puns about German grammar, how he dreams of unbuttoning her coat slowly in his loft while snow falls outside and acoustic guitar drifts from an unseen window across the canal. He doesn't rush. Desire, to him, is a scent that must unfold in layers. And when it finally does—when skin meets in candlelight aboard that converted barge cinema floating down Spree—he wants every touch to feel like both surrender and homecoming. The city, with its wild edges and frozen canals, doesn’t make love easy. But it makes it real.