Smell You Later, Alligator
How to: time travel
I am a nostalgic girl.
Perhaps nostalgic isn’t the word. It’s not always the past I’m drawn to; I’m usually yearning for the future too. Yearning for my next whip of travel, an imaginary future where a lover might have worked out, or picturing the sexy mature woman I’ll be—must be (please)—in five years. Picture this: you’re the shadiest merchant in a bustling market and you are probably trying to sell me fake airpods that smell strange, but then you hand me a half cracked jar with a dog-eared sticker labeled “anywhere but the present”. Boom, I’m sold! Throw in the fake airpods too, why don’t you?
Smell is something I take very seriously.
As a collector of sensations and cheerleader for things that make you feel, I have to be. As an accidental avoider of the present, it is one of my favorite quirks to tune into. Music and auditory distractions are my top ones though, as you will see.
When I was seventeen, I got a new perfume as a Christmas gift. The scent was, don’t laugh, “You & I” by One Direction. With a giant diamond-like top and purple details all around the bottle, I had probably hoped it would smell like the “sexy mature woman” I was hoping to become in a few years in the adult world. Who will tell sweet naive me that I absolutely do not want to smell like a peach mango explosion with a random hint of sandalwood now as the current “sexy mature woman” from the future?
Side note: that was definitely where I began assessing my favorite bases and notes in a smell: the lightest flairs of fruit and flower but a deep feminine smelling musk with woody tones. Throw in some amber and what critics call “warm spicy” and I would’ve almost had it correct as a teenager.
Earlier this week, I was dropping my sister back off at university after Thanksgiving break and with a 3-4 hour drive, I began listening to “The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet” by John Green. His chapter, “Scratch ‘n’ Sniff Stickers”, made me giddy with the way he talked about his matching fixation on smell. An ally!
As I listened, I learnt cool facts about micro-encapsulation: the process that allows scratch and sniff stickers to function the way they do. Green continued on to marvel as I do about how difficult it is to imitate unique smells, how smell will be one of the parts of the world that virtual reality fails to touch (for now), and how artificial intelligence struggles to understand or mimic real scents because humans are liars who publish in novels, movies, and media that other humans smell like [insert positively acclaimed fruit or flower] and that nature smells better than it actually does (sometimes, nature just smells like dirt).
Exactly! I agreed, cruising down the highway. Yes, John Green, smell IS a wizard and the magic IS memory. And memory is so COOL, especially regarding human existence and collective memory. It’s so silly we have all this collective memory and smells and yet robots of the future will repeat to the next generations or maybe aliens that invade us that humans smelt like vanilla!
Side note again: I asked ChatGPT 3.5 and it does relay the reality of how humans smell like sweat and body chemistry. But it also did tell me that by the year 2500, humans could engineer a biotechnological way to smell artificially like the cute smells we pretend we’ve always smelt like. For the sake of my tale, let’s keep pretending AI will never get humans. They’ll never understand us! They’ll never actually know what we smelt like!
Anyways, I arrived home and did what I do every few months. I rummaged through my room’s corners for near-empty perfume bottles, old candle jars, and random articles of clothing.
“You smell so good,” my first boyfriend told me once I started wearing that One Direction perfume. He would dip his face into my neck every time we met. When we broke up, the perfume was coincidentally near completion as well. I began using it less and less, half because I had grown out of the smell and in the post-breakup desire for self transformation wanted change, and half because I left it to collect dust in fear the smell would make me go back to him.
One day when I smelt it again, my mind spun and I had to freeze at the perfume’s ability to transport me so vividly back to our first kiss in the snow, montages of summers spent together, and equally through moments from early college. Magic, I observed.
Ever since then, I have been calculating smells like a witch with potions.
When I moved to New York City, I had specific candles in my room. There were three candles: a Japanese blossom one I had found for free for the first six months I lived with not one but two criminals, a candle called “Harvest Brunch” for the apartment I thankfully moved into later that fall, and one I cannot remember the name of that I bought at an indie market in Williamsburg on a Sunday after finally feeling at home in the city. It was one of the last ones the seller had made themselves in their new small business and it felt perfect for that chapter where I had my own routines and a sense of self in the city. This one I have lost in between moves.
My own perfume has a very unique smell. Remember when John Green and I emphasized that scents are difficult to imitate and recreate?
I solidified this by picking four different bottles that I liked enough individually, never really asking what each were and taking the risk of mixing all of them at once in one of the many perfume shops in Amman, Jordan back in 2019. With a stroke of luck, I had created the best perfume I’ve ever smelt to this day.
For years, I have been known by friends and others for this distinct smell’s mixture of amber, honey, wood, and a deep white musk.
Earlier this year in Egypt, I tried recreating it, ready to defy science and to reverse order memory to drag out a smell. Six hours and one extremely patient Egyptian perfume expert later, I failed. I will never be able to recreate that scent. But I did end up creating a new signature scent that smells like a mix of Maison Francis Kurkdjian Baccarat Rouge 540, hints of amber and flower, one of the many Arabic “oud” scents which translates to “wood”, and a surprise element of…coconut?
Oud is the reason I handcraft my perfumes only in the Middle East (…um I’ve been there twice), that rich intoxicating woody Arabic smell that has not been replicated in western scents and definitely not in “scents for women”. Attempted yes, but replicated? I hope it never is. Additionally, they mainly bottle their perfumes in oil form rather than spray, and I love oils. Oil in my hair, oil for my body, oil based skincare–big oily girl! For smells, oils hold more of the concentrated scent and last longer (as AI will in the war vs humans).
I also switch my perfumes when I fall in love. Well, I throw in a specific new scent when someone meaningful juts forward in my life. I could be in the middle of a candle specifically tied to a new job or recent shift in life while wearing my Never To Be Recreated Yaju scent from Jordan when I will overlap a little second perfume if I start really liking someone, one I wear specifically with them. It’s why I told my last major love affair to buy me a perfume if they got me a gift. They did.
It’s also why when I was parting ways with another lover, I gave them a goodbye candle that I perfected with meticulous detail, dribbling in the sacred drops of my Never To Be Recreated perfume oil. I smirked when I lit the candle, the fire glowing a beautiful orange and the room becoming engulfed by a smell that I can only describe as so precisely me.
I never said I’d wield this magic for good, did I?
From all the exquisite smells out there to the cognitive processes and magical powers of what it can do for us humans with memory and emotion, I cherish smell and will wield it for quite some time.
To me, it is one of the few things that time is vulnerable against. Usually, time skitters around during a good moment and escapes us, traps us in agonizingly slow days and deceives us that rough repetitive days are forever, or runs through our bodies leaving nothing but wrinkles and creaky bones in its wake.
When time decides to erratically hop in and out of you, you look around and you wonder how you got here, weren’t we just driving home in tears with blushed cheeks and cold hands because we just had our first kiss? Wasn’t I just wide-eyed and lonely but happy in the city I always dreamt of? Wasn’t it just summer, how is it already almost December?
We spend our whole lives trying to understand this vast irreversible, intangible, and irresistible transgression of change and the linear path that only goes forward, never back and never forward how you think it will.
But, Time, I caught you!
It’s not always an accurate method, but it is my favorite method alongside music, words, and walks through places haunted by my past. I am like many collectors on Earth and many fools who try to catch it.
When time does all that it does, I follow behind like a child bewitched by a fairy trying to catch it with a net. That child grows into a witch, who will collect some of the fairydust that that slippery fairy leaves sprinkled behind and use it on objects and potions from faraway lands and written spells and songs.
These days, I just sit under a tree and watch the fairy float through the garden if I see it. My net rests by my side, I haven’t touched it in months. There are better things to do and a whole garden that has been here to admire, to nurture, and to enjoy.
For people sitting under their own trees, cities bustling on, and friends who somehow somewhere became strangers asking: Did you forget me?
The truth is I have. My memory and sense of smell both went downhill after two rounds of Covid-19 and it does not help that I have object permanence when it comes to most people and things.
But in my little lair, under my little tree, and in my little almost empty bottles and candle jars, I will always try and remember you.
What began as a conniving little plan to have voluntary sensory relapses back into my past has become a cherished format of recording chapters of life and people I’ve loved in every which way. This is my act of defiance against the sound of sand slipping down an hourglass and the hands of a clock and the shrieks of a million questions.
This dimension of space, this mass owner of experience and human life, owns us and flows onward and I’ve accepted it for the most part. I’m satisfied as a twenty-something can be and warmed by my means of teleportation and the pieces that time has allowed me to keep. I like to think that I win even a little, but we all know, you only can keep what that mischievous little thing lets you. It doesn’t listen to anyone, never stops and waits, and it always passes.
I’m content with the dance I do with time and memory right now. To stretch time and pause it and feel it, I will go on those metal vessels that time travel between soils and switch out perfumes and candles. To transform time into memory, I will capture it in smells, words, music, and habits. To invoke memory, I look at all that has been collected and open everything up. And I try to get on ADHD meds.
If you ask me what first love smells like, it smells like “You & I” by One Direction to me.
If you ask me what being happy in New York City smells like, one of the big scents is “Harvest Brunch” by Opalhouse.
If you ask me what traveling the world smells like, I’ll let you smell the French perfume I bought when I was in Europe and the incense I brought back from Nepal and the healing oils from Sri Lanka and teas from Japan and corn coffee from Mexico and—you get it. I try to bring back a smell more than any other souvenir, bonus points if it’s also the aromatic beverage I drank every morning there.
If I want to revisit an old friend, an old apartment or job, that random summer, or that hopeful winter, and maybe remember what it was like to kiss an old lover or two, I sit in my room and breathe in and out of bottles where they live now.
Sometimes, I even like to go back to bad places and press on old wounds of time that I thought would never pass because I can close the bottle and I am reminded that it all passes, it always does. I’ve become better at being intentional with time, these smelly capsules help with this too. I am—at least, I try to be—where my feet are.
If you want to know what a time traveler smells like, well, you’ll have to press your face in my neck. You can ask and you must say please. I might let you.
Until then, smell you later, alligator.