by Maya Snyder
I used to hate walking. If I ever went on walks around my neighborhood, it’d just feel like a race to get back home. I didn’t think the outside world had much to offer me, especially if it was looking so bleak. If you walked far out, you’d have to walk far to return. Typical patterns, a chore. It remained that way until I started paying attention to something, anything. The little things, like interesting sounds or changes in the weather. What really did it for me was the scents. It drives me mad, walking past a house and smelling laundry detergent; maybe even fabric softener. It feels almost immoral, hoping that the scent will linger until the end of the sidewalk. Maybe if I get lucky, I’ll just happen to walk past another house, also doing their midweek laundry. Even if the air hangs cold, the smell always permeates warmly. It could be that laundry detergent just smells really good to me, but I think I just miss how it felt when I smelt it the first time on someone I used to know. Is that when I started paying attention to scents? I don’t even have a specific memory that I look for anymore, it’s all just familiarity.
Scent-memory association never worked for me in academics, which is what I find makes this revelation cruel. In a single moment, I’m thrown into a panic all over again. It smells like danger, or could it be caution? I didn’t know something could smell like that. I feel like I’m backing into a wall, but it’s gone before I know it. It never feels right. Do I go back and stick around for a while until I come to terms with it? It’s almost too sick of a thought. Sometimes I feel like I should go through all the laundry detergents to find the one, but then it’d be too forced. It’s a shame that such a pleasant scent could be tarnished with lingering ghosts of my past.