maturing is discovering your love for perfume

nostalgia as a portal to the past

have you ever come across an old perfume whilst decluttering your room, and found that the scent instantly transports you back in time to another version of you? scent is the worst-kept secret to time travel. i think that’s why i’m starting to appreciate my olfactory sense more as i grow older, as i accumulate more memories of my life and create more associations with scents.

for a long time i couldn’t relate to the magic of “perfume time travel”, partly because i used to never wear perfume and because i am still young. nostalgia is a relatively new concept for a girl just entering her twenties. since childhood i have moved many times, and there are significant gaps between the different “eras” of me, pauses in time widened by distance and change. each era is lonely and contains its own distinct memories, complete with all five senses bottled up into imagery that comes to me in dreams or moments of deja vu. they adorn the walls of my life’s museum like silent statues, coming alive to the call of the mosque with its trembling song, or the smell of the earth softening as it drinks from a long-expected rain shower. there are so many younger versions of me lined up, they make me feel old. and so far away from the golden days of my childhood. storm clouds don’t let much light through.

there’s something uncanny about the process of feeling nostalgic for the first time about an era like secondary school. sometimes i forget i ever left; the current moment so often feels like a transitory phase in the grand scheme of a life that will forever loop back to childhood and adolescence. these years feel like yesterday, but here we are, three perfumes later. sweet vanilla of high school, the floral scent of spring blossoming into summer, and the perfect cappuccino/wool sweater blend of the perfume i’ve been wearing since last autumn. but my favorite scent portals are the ones that take me back to my childhood.

structure of a perfume // architecture of a memory

the perfume of slow mornings: top notes of the choir’s song from the catholic church on the corner, birdsong and distant traffic; heart notes of unrushed presence, the comfort of the only home you had ever lived in back then, and promises of the full day ahead; and finally the base notes of security and forever.

the perfume of sentimentality and simplicity: top notes of dragonfly wings and flowers; heart notes of journals and moon songs and handwritten letters; base notes of homesickness, youth and an innate appreciation for beauty.

the perfume of the budding mind: top notes of cursive and creative crafts, national geographic and sudoku; heart notes of make-believe games and experimentation; base notes of books and curiosity and the little girl writing stories on the family computer.

the perfume of rainy school days: top notes of mud and slick frogs and wet dogs; heart notes of all the ways we’d conjure up warmth, classical music in math class, the green of the earth refreshed and renewed; base notes of unconditional friendship and nourished souls.

i admit this piece isn’t really about perfume, though it did originally inspire me to write about nostalgia. it’s about the home i’ve made in my memories. the world in my head which consists of the past and what the past could have been. nostalgia as a way to dissolve time, nostalgia as a way to breach the gaps in the self, nostalgia as the warmth of everything i miss, nostalgia as the stinging aftermath of loss as well as the soothing remedy to the painful letting go. i’m homesick. but i’m also homesick for myself. so the best i can do right now is slow down, and sit with myself in the current moment. being present with the person i am today, who will also someday be fossilized into a perfume and sit with her embalmed sisters in the museum of me. to live in the present moment is to constantly be reborn into another version of myself, so why would i waste my life digging up graves?

in order to create a perfume of memories, you must first stop and smell the roses.

thank you so much for reading, until next time ⋆˚꩜｡