09.28.08

Scents and Senti-bility

Posted in Uncategorized at 1:34 am by Miracle ♪♫

While some people dream in colour, I dream in scents and am oddly conscious of my olfactory sense while awake. My memory brings me back to a time when my childhood best friend, Vinz, came home to Dipolog from his first semester of college in Cebu. Uninformed that he would visit us at that hour; I was out when he came over to the house, so he and Dandi had to wait for me. When they heard me coming, Vinz hid behind a wall. (How childish we were! Haha) At the door’s entrance, I breathed the air and averred without a hint of hesitation, “Vinz is here!” The incident should not imply that my friend bears such a powerful scent, because he does not, and I can maybe even take a stab at being poetic about it, but I won’t. The episode simply confirmed my freakish sense of smell.

Years later, I would be caged at the back of our “mini-pooper” while a certain gentleman along with Franz and my family members sat in the anterior rows. I happened to be at nose-level with this man’s nape. He donned no perfume or cologne but he had the fragrance of a book’s pages! Almost like that hardbound, Harvard Classics’ early 1900s publication of Virgil’s Aeneid perched imperiously on my shelf. A book that I inhale by stealth but of which I feel ineligible to touch. Months later, and miles away from where that event took place, I recognized the same man’s momentarily abandoned school uniform because of the same scent. So you see why I had to react when the new perfume, In the Library, came out on the market.

I can rummage through more of my peculiar nosy histories, not to mention refusing to send a blouse and shirt to the laundry for the sake of possessing and retaining meaningful scents. But it is 2:00 a.m. and I smell the dampness of dawn already. I should go to bed now and dream… in heavenly aromas, I hope.

Knowing the people you love by their scent is a unique gift…but you have to guarantee that you should not wish to erase any of them from your memory. Otherwise, it would be all the more impossible.

“Nothing is more memorable than a smell,” commenced Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses, and it continues by saying that “we see when there is light enough, taste only when we put things into our mouths, touch only when we make contact with someone or something, hear only sounds that are loud enough, but we smell always with every breath. Cover your eyes and you will stop seeing, cover your ears and you will stop hearing, but if you cover your nose and try to stop smelling, you will die.”

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