Nostalgia
My new icon is a bottle of Nostalgia, the perfume featured in Alan Moore's Watchmen, and I've chosen it because I've felt myself grow nostalgic lately, and not necessarily in a bad way. I've thought about making it the background on my cell phone but I haven't done that yet. I love the predominant colors, but then I've always liked dark purples and dark blues, and there's something about the shape that's made me wish they'd come out with that very bottle. I love the perfume as a symbol that slips out of hand and goes tumbling to waste.
I know what nostalgia smells like - of all things, I know that. It smells like rooms that are no more, or have been redone and filled with new things so that the old composition is lost. It smells like golden afternoons in the back yard and the light salty breezes of days at the beach. It smells like my grandmother's cooking in the morning, when she would wake me up with her signature fried eggs, potatoes, and onions. It smells like my father's Old Spice and cigarettes. It smells like old haunts - zuppa toscana and Italian spices at the Olive Garden Laurel and I used to frequent, the dusty undertones of my favorite used bookstore. It smells like the skin of lovers who used to be pressed cheek to cheek, stubble smoothed with aftershave and warm pressure points that have absorbed cologne and given it back mixed with the personal scent assigned to that one person, a scent that cannot be likened to food but might make your mouth water.
There's no way they could actually make a perfume that would hold the real scent of nostaglia, because that scent is utterly personal and unique, a blend created out of a life spent wandering through this fragrant world. And yet we all know the spectral scent of nostalgia intimately, whether we savour it or not.
I know what nostalgia smells like - of all things, I know that. It smells like rooms that are no more, or have been redone and filled with new things so that the old composition is lost. It smells like golden afternoons in the back yard and the light salty breezes of days at the beach. It smells like my grandmother's cooking in the morning, when she would wake me up with her signature fried eggs, potatoes, and onions. It smells like my father's Old Spice and cigarettes. It smells like old haunts - zuppa toscana and Italian spices at the Olive Garden Laurel and I used to frequent, the dusty undertones of my favorite used bookstore. It smells like the skin of lovers who used to be pressed cheek to cheek, stubble smoothed with aftershave and warm pressure points that have absorbed cologne and given it back mixed with the personal scent assigned to that one person, a scent that cannot be likened to food but might make your mouth water.
There's no way they could actually make a perfume that would hold the real scent of nostaglia, because that scent is utterly personal and unique, a blend created out of a life spent wandering through this fragrant world. And yet we all know the spectral scent of nostalgia intimately, whether we savour it or not.