Someone I wasn't dating broke up with me on the street. It started to thunderstorm and it was maybe 90 degrees outside. I cried for a moment in the rain. I heard a quote that goes along the lines of "If you cry in the rain, no one will know you are crying." Thats not true.
I walked up Bowery and went into a small shop on east 4th where you can make your own fragrance using 7-10 different oils. It takes quite a while because there are maybe 200 different oils. While I was making my selection, the old Thai woman who's owned the place for decades said, "I can smell cancer, you know."
The scent only smelled good right when I made it, but that night at dinner, all of my friends told me I smelled like a box of baby wipes. I never used the scent again, but, finding it a couple of years later, and smelling the preserved mixture of geranium, grapefruit, rose hip, gardenia, etc., it was a nice way of watching a memory. I've heard many times that scent is the best mode of sensory for recalling memories, but usually we smell the same scent over time and that one particular aroma may recall more than one memory. It's nice to know that I possess a bottle of a single memory that doesnt share any other pasts. No one else has worn it nor have I worn it since that pitiful day. The best part is that the perfume I made doesn't make me sad when I smell it, it actually just makes me cringe with embarrassment but in a very comforting way maybe only I can understand.
I was walking up a very quiet street one time when I got a whiff of perfume that transported me back to the backseat of my mom's car. The scent came in another wave a few moments later andI could envision my mother and I at a shopping center. I ran to the only person in front of me and asked them what scent they were wearing. It was Chanel Mademoiselle. I called my mom to ask if she had ever worn that particular perfume and she said she had, but only for a short time.
Sometimes I smell other cities inside of New York. The Upper East Side often smells like Tokyo and the Lower East Side smells like the Hungarian countryside. I like the way public libraries smell like germs.
Maybe the next time something traumatizing happens to me, I'll walk into a drug store and buy any perfume and wear it just for that day. Then I could add the bottle to my box and have a box of fragrant time capsules. It could be good days or bad days, but maybe most importantly days I just want to smell again.
-m.
I've had this same experience with scents. I'm still stopped in my tracks when women smell like Roset, the best smelling woman i've ever known, my friend alexa from elementary sdchool's mom. I still don't know what she smells like.
ReplyDeleteI remember a few years ago my friend had just started dating a new person. She was worried he was going to foget about her when he went away to Europe for the summer. She said she'd never worn perfume.
"what a waste," i said. "having a signature scent is the most manipulative thing you can do."
In college an acquaintance mounted an art exhibition. he was a photographer, a shitty one. he had the somewhat cute idea of asking people he knew were former lovers to pose together for his photographs. the artist asked an ex- who remained a dear friend- and i to participate. we stood dressed in our underwear in the photo studio he'd set up on the fourth floor of the library. the shoot proceeded as normal until my ex froze and burrowed his head into my clavicle.
"what's wrong?" i asked
"your perfume," he whispered. "i'm sorry. your perfume is making me hard. you smell the same."
after the photo shoot we went back to my apartment and held each other in silence, inhaling deeply into each others necks.