My grandmother always smelled of roses. The biggest cliché, but the truth, nevertheless. For my entire life, she wore the same drugstore perfume that my mother brought her from the States, a mix of powder and petal. It went well with the rest of her: so petite that I grew taller than her very early, the skin of her neck soft and cool when I tucked my face there, her smile always rosy-appled. For a long time after her passing, I stayed away from roses — not necessarily because the reminder was painful, but because I knew the scent wouldn’t live up to the memory.
In a Bed Bath & Beyond a few years ago, I picked up a bottle of hand soap on a whim and inhaled. Peeling shutters, walls papered with flowers, knife scraping jam on bread, all this flooded in on that one breath. I was a teenager when she died, unable to go to the funeral a continent away. The summers I spent with her had started to feel like misremembered dreams, and they felt suddenly, momentarily sharper. But standing there in the kitchen aisle, it felt like the first time I fully understood what I had lost. Years of mourning fell through my ribcage and knocked me windless. My grief, a trespasser through a rotten wood floor.
Scent is one of the strongest harbingers of memory, but the past can come up anywhere in the body: a familiar building or face, a piece of clothing. I’d be remiss as an artist if I left out music, which has been proven to help dementia patients regain some of their cognitive function, for example. And sometimes it’s much simpler than that: a song can pull us back to the moment we first heard it, the season we played it over and over, the person who made it important.
A nostalgia of the senses is one we don’t ask for. It comes at us swinging, plunging us headfirst into lost time. At best, it might bring us comfort, an echo of sweeter times; at worst, it could remind us of what is no longer ours to enjoy, or bring back our worst ordeals and traumas. One lonely, desperate winter in college, and now every year the first grey chill of November makes my stomach curl. The waft of jasmine is long dazzling nights out with friends in a perfume bottle. A particular blend of spices and tea reminds me too much of an ex to be drinkable.
I am not a scientist, and not even they can explain all the strange workings of memory. But these days, I have been thinking about what will remind me of this time — this year, suspended, hung on a clothesline between the others. I’m not talking about the things written in newspapers or in journals, not the way we will recount this time to those who didn’t live through it, not the things found dust-buried in basements. I mean more the things felt, stacked in the basement of the body, waiting to be called up. A glimpse or a scent or a song, that might cross me in months or years from now, and bring this year and its fury of stillness rushing back.
My therapist likes to talk about grounding. When she says it, I always imagine planting my feet firmly below me, two childlike stomps, refusing to be blown away. In the early days of isolation, she encouraged me to come out of my head in moments of anxiety or emotional flatline, to describe where I was using only my senses. It’s a good tool, for someone who more easily defaults to the regrets and golden days of the past, or the terrors of the future. To ask my brain to recognize my body. To work with the moment I have.
Sometimes I worry that my sense memories of this year will be all gold-tipped, cataloging the elusive mundane pleasures. Or the opposite: I panic that my body will be marked by this year like a brand, that I will carry the fear and the hopelessness with me and never be able to take it off.
But sometimes, I hear my therapist’s voice: You’re in your head again. Only what’s around you. What’s in you.
I take a long breath, I look around. My body notices, lets everything steep like tea leaves.
The bar of soap I have been using all summer, milky citrus so sharp that it stings on the inhale. The bellyaching wail of a fire engine, crimson headlights flashing sleepless across the ceiling. Four o’clock, when sunlight spreads across the kitchen like honey over bread. Crying so hard that the salt borders on the sour point of vomiting. White lilies filling a room with their drowsy green-sweetness.
For better or worse, my body will remember more clearly than I can.
Further reading
New Study Indicates That Sense of Smell Could Play Major Role in New Approaches to Treating PTSD (McLean Hospital)
Inherited Trauma Shapes Your Health (The Atlantic)
How Will We Remember The Coronavirus Pandemic? (Discover Magazine)