Free writing - Smells
For me, smell and taste have always been damaged. I could never manage the complete experience. Taste is texture, and smell… smell was practically non-existent. But I remember waiting at the petrol stations, breathing in the petrol fumes. I can’t remember why I liked it. I remember being practically blown down the street in the worst storm in years, with the contrasting beauty of the smell of the rain and the raw fear I could smell radiating from me. It felt heavy, it smelled dead. Death and crisp purity shouldn’t be mixed.
Now the smells I get are extremes: strong body odour, the musty air on the library’s fourth floor, the dead emptiness of air-conditioned air… my puppies with their wet manes rubbing themselves on every piece of furniture in the house. Sometimes I miss smells, like hot chocolate. Sometimes I wish I had even less of the sense. Usually I only feel this way when I’m taking out the bins, or my brother is cooking something atrocious.
There are some subtle, quiet smells I can still manage to catch. Rain is always there. The lightness, the crispness in the wet air right before it starts, and the cleansed aftermath. The grass, my dogs, my clothes, all drenched in it. It’s rainy days like that when I don’t mind missing out on flowers and my mother asking whether something smells clean, or a new car. Rainy days help me get past freshly cut grass, and perfume, and everything else that I’m missing out on.
interesting notes - I now have an explanation for my lifelong damaged sense of smell. Apparently I have a deviated septum. You know, if I'd known that a couple of years ago, it really would have explained a lot of things.
- Every time I write about that storm, I feel myself back there. That's probably the closest I've ever been to a near-death experience. I remember being blown down the street, certain there was no way I was going to make it. Then one of the girls in my class (I have no idea how she could have seen me through all that) got her mother to pick me up, and I was safe. As I got in the car, we saw a piece of corrugated iron from someone's shed blow madly down the street where I would have been standing if not for this girl. I would never have seen it coming.
Now the smells I get are extremes: strong body odour, the musty air on the library’s fourth floor, the dead emptiness of air-conditioned air… my puppies with their wet manes rubbing themselves on every piece of furniture in the house. Sometimes I miss smells, like hot chocolate. Sometimes I wish I had even less of the sense. Usually I only feel this way when I’m taking out the bins, or my brother is cooking something atrocious.
There are some subtle, quiet smells I can still manage to catch. Rain is always there. The lightness, the crispness in the wet air right before it starts, and the cleansed aftermath. The grass, my dogs, my clothes, all drenched in it. It’s rainy days like that when I don’t mind missing out on flowers and my mother asking whether something smells clean, or a new car. Rainy days help me get past freshly cut grass, and perfume, and everything else that I’m missing out on.
interesting notes - I now have an explanation for my lifelong damaged sense of smell. Apparently I have a deviated septum. You know, if I'd known that a couple of years ago, it really would have explained a lot of things.
- Every time I write about that storm, I feel myself back there. That's probably the closest I've ever been to a near-death experience. I remember being blown down the street, certain there was no way I was going to make it. Then one of the girls in my class (I have no idea how she could have seen me through all that) got her mother to pick me up, and I was safe. As I got in the car, we saw a piece of corrugated iron from someone's shed blow madly down the street where I would have been standing if not for this girl. I would never have seen it coming.