Lately, I’ve been thinking about how viscerally our senses connect us to memory and the past.
Recently, I went to the Body Shop in search of hand cream and came out with a small tube of British Rose. The first time I used it, I wondered why thoughts of my exchange in France four years ago came whirring so suddenly into my head. It was all right there. There was my close little room in the residence, the peach orange blanket, washing draped over every available surface, the window collecting condensation and the radiator warming silently. There were the sounds of doors slamming all up and down the hall and my neighbour’s muffled Cold Play, played on laptop speakers, coming through our shared wall. There were the postcards blu-tacked to the walls and the lemon-yellow placemat that daylighted as a laptop mat. There was the child’s play stool that I used as a makeshift bedside table. And that, that was the key. Because I kept three things on that stool: my current read, a tiny speaker you could fit in one hand, and a tube of British Rose hand cream that I used to put on every night before bed and every morning before I left the residence. British Rose and damp washing (washing that, without a line upon which to dry it and a winter too cold to open the window to, used to take three whole days to dry), these were the scents of that tiny room that I lived in for 6 months. British Rose followed me down the mountain to the city centre. British Rose boarded the train with me to Lyon to see the festival of lights. British Rose lost itself to old sweat smells in the tiny residence gym, to old beer smells in the tiny residence bar, fought my eyelids with me in an 8am lecture on French literary theory on a Friday morning. And yet, at the time, it was such an insignificant part of my routine that it was quickly forgotten once the tube had run out. I started thinking about other smells that cause that same rush of nostalgia. To me, the entirety of Europe is the smell of cigarettes and weed. Fabric softener stirs longing and regret. The smell of rain in the air is 7 am summer cross country practice in Fred Bond Park. Bleach is plantar warts and the slimy tiles around the indoor swimming pool where we learnt to swim. It’s the cavernous echo that the water created of shouted instructions and furious splashing. But it’s not just smell. It’s all the senses. I can’t hear Rihanna’s “Diamonds” without being taken instantly back to an indoor track meet – my first ever - in middle-of-nowhere North Carolina, and all the accompanying, full-body jitters that came with it. As the song plays, I remember how it felt to take the curve of the track at 60 percent speed in the warmup. I remember that was the thing that had struck me most. Because the track was only 200 metres, there were no yawning straights, only a constant, gentle curve. I remember the feel of my ponytail, the longest it had ever been, bound in a rope and gently knocking against my back. I remember the deep throb of night outside the industrial doors and the eerie glow of the lights that barely extended to the parking lot. The song itself would be unremarkable, if not for the fact that it was playing over the loudspeakers on that almost delirious night. There are all sorts of memory sounds. What stories does the crackle of a plastic covered library book jacket remind you of? For me, it’s James Patterson mysteries (we all have our shameful teenage phases). When we came back to Australia the first time, after two years away, the sound of the magpies warbling in the early morning caught at something in my chest. The first full cup of coffee I ever had was a soy mocha I purchased for myself right before a 4-6pm creative writing tutorial at uni, because the afternoon had been molasses slow and I knew I would have trouble focussing. From everything I knew of coffee, it seemed it would be the perfect remedy. I understand that it was mostly placebo, but the coffee made my hands shake as I wrote and I felt fearless with energy. Now that first sip of a soy mocha is enough to put me back there in that almost subterranean classroom where I got excited about writing again (and also the moment I first started the inevitable slide towards a minor caffeine addiction, but that’s neither here nor there.) And finally, there’s touch. We all have our sweat-slicked palm moments that take us back to pre-competition or first date nausea. The feel of cashmere reminds me of Black Friday sales, of heading out in the dead quiet night at 11 pm to find the mall an impossible glowing oasis in the biting cold. Rubbing a dog’s soft, floppy ears always makes me a little bit teary-eyed because my fingers instantly recall our old beagle’s ears, and the little flick back into place they made as I diligently turned them in the right way for him while he dozed. It's something they tell you all the time in writing workshops: sensory language is key. And this is exactly why. Your characters won’t feel real until they are attended by all these sounds and smells that really, more than anything else, make up a person. I’m trying to be sparing with my use of British Rose now, because I worry that if I use it too much, my nose will become accustomed to it, and start layering over the memories of my exchange with these wearisome working-from-home days. Both are good to remember, but only the former is an escape in the way that the word nostalgia intends. There’s all sorts of science behind this connection of sense to memory, I know. But it suits me better to be able to say that it is a kind of mundane, yet extraordinary magic. A gift of teleportation, or time travel, activated by the simple act of putting on hand cream.
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Love in the time of the pre-apocalypseWelcome to my blog! And good luck to you. What you'll find here are the musings, anecdotes, and anxieties of a young suburbanite in the 21st century. Archives
January 2024
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