prose, 10/28/13

The sense of smell. People say it's linked strongest to memories. I think some of the people who have said this have been scientists or researchers so it must be true. I know it to be true. Never have I experienced time travel until I experienced it when smelling that smell on that person who walked into that store. That random stranger. And then I wasn't grocery shopping anymore. I wasn't there at all anymore. I was three years in the past. An ache in my heart and a disease tainting my thoughts. I wasn't 21 and fixed anymore, I was 18 and broken. I curled up on my bed and let the sad music play and closed my eyes. And then I moved. I took a step forward and wasn't in my bed anymore, I was back in the grocery store. Smell is such a funny thing.

Sometimes I wanna bottle scents. Those smells. The smells that break your heart. The smells that put you together. The fragrances that takes the fragments in you and makes them whole. I want to bottle them. And sometimes I want to scrub myself with them. Sometimes I want to use it like it's soap. Sometimes I want to scrub and scrub and scrub. Pushing down with my right hand and rubbing the scent into my left arm, with a loofa or washcloth or anything.  I want to felt it go past my skin and through my bloodstream. Into my veins. I want my arm to turn red. Like I want to push it past the surface and into the part of me that matters. I want the scent pumping through me instead of whatever normally does it. I think I would live better that way. Sometimes, I mean.

Other times  I seem to have the opposite urge. Sometimes I feel like the smell is already inside me. Waiting patiently to be smelt. And then I smell it. I smell it when the stranger walks by at the grocery store. I smell it when I get too close to forgetting what it smells like. I smell it and I feel something rush up from my toes and right to the middle of my heart. It's not always pleasant, this feeling. Sometimes I think my heart burts. Because this scent has something on me. It know me too well. It's been there, at 3am when I can't fall asleep. It's like this scent wants to be my undoing, wants to cause my reckoning. Because it reminds me of a time that's gone. A time that never was. A what that will never be. These times, I don't want to scrub. I want to pull. I want to rip off the surface and yank the scent from inside of me. I want to throw it away in a trash bin and light it on fire. I never want to smell that smell again...

but it is such a sweet smell.

So I put out the fire, bottle the scent, and scrub until it's inside again.