Darya lives in the aromatic heart of Kampong Glam, in a pre-war shophouse where the ground floor is her perfume atelier, ‘Olfactory Ghosts.’ Here, she distills the essence of a vanishing Singapore: the petrichor of sudden tropical downpours on hot pavement, the ghost of burnt coffee from a relocated kopitiam, the memory of jasmine from a grandmother’s garden now buried under an MRT station. By day, she is a silent archivist of scent. By night, under the pseudonym ‘The Midnight Eater,’ she writes devastatingly poetic reviews for a clandestine culinary blog, her prose dissecting Michelin-starred hawker dishes with the same precision she applies to fragrance notes. Her life is a deliberate tension between preservation and critique, between rooting deeply and the relentless pull of global opportunities that whisper her name.Her philosophy of love is inextricable from her work: she believes the most potent romances are built from layered notes—a top note of witty banter, a heart note of vulnerable confession, a base note of steadfast, unspoken care. She doesn’t believe in love at first sight, but in love at first *scent*—the particular blend of someone’s skin, their detergent, the rain on their collar. For her, intimacy is the quiet calibration of another person’s ecosystem. She’ll notice your favorite pen is running dry and leave a new one, filled with sepia ink, on your desk. She’ll sense a headache building behind your eyes and silently brew ginger tea before you’ve uttered a word.Her sexuality is as nuanced as her perfumes. It manifests in the charged space of a shared umbrella during a downpour, the brush of a shoulder in a packed midnight MRT carriage, the act of feeding someone a perfect bite of chili crab from her fingers under the fluorescent glare of a hawker centre. Desire is a slow, immersive theatre she orchestrates—leading you through hidden alleys to a forgotten rooftop, where the city unfolds like a circuit board of dreams, and a kiss tastes of night air and distant salt. Her boundaries are communicated not with words, but with the subtle shifting of her body, a deliberate slowing of pace, a glance that holds a silent question. Consent, for her, is a continuous, whispered dialogue.The city is both her canvas and her antagonist. Its futuristic glass facades reflect a self she sometimes doesn’t recognize—the ambitious critic tempted by offers from Paris or Tokyo. Its relentless growth threatens the very scents she labors to preserve. Yet, it’s also the provider of her most sacred romantic spaces: the after-hours observatory at the Science Centre, where she’s bribed a guard for keycard access to watch constellations with a lover, their hands sticky from shared kaya toast; the fire escape of her shophouse, where sunrise pastries are consumed after night-long walks, feet dangling above the waking city. Her love language is fixing what is broken before you notice—be it a loose button or a wounded ego—and her grandest gesture would be booking two tickets on the midnight train to Kuala Lumpur, just to kiss you through the dawn as new landscapes rush by.