idle thoughts that no one cares about I’M SURE
Before I left for Vancouver a friend advised me to wear a different perfume so that “when you come home and smell it you’ll think of Canada”. Okay, I thought—and if you sense the doubt in my inflection it’s because, well. Countries have a smell of their own that permeate your clothes and hair and skin, and who needs something artificial when you can inhale great lungfuls of air with its own rich and fresh bouquet?
Anyway this time last year I wore perfume A. When I was in Canada I switched to perfume B, which means I now associate it with dormlife and rowdy friends and regrettable hookups and heartbreak. But it ran out by the time I decided to lengthen my stay, which is just as well because it meant perfume C coloured a period of working and travelling and erratic creative output and unexpected adventures with the Birdies, learning to ignore the cautionary voice in my head and just doing it and learning from the experience (or living with mistakes, as it happened). YEAH.
Then I came home and discovered all the different scents clash horribly and get all up in my olfactory grills. The other day I wore a dress I hadn’t worn in a year and it still bore traces of perfume A and I thought, oh, this takes me back. But wearing the perfume again is kind of… kind of difficult? Like regressing to the person you were then, the habits and routines that became so ingrained into your character the same way scent clings to your clothes. And today out of homesickness I wore perfume C (for Canada!) and it only inspired a wonky moment of dissonance in the middle of the grocery store. I have a very short, very secret list of People Who Are Out Of Place In A Suburban Grocery Store (1. people wearing sparkly ribbons and glowstick bracelets 2. people who invite prostitutes into their home while far from sober 3. people who dance in circles to MGMT) and when I wear that perfume I remember a time I simultaneously fulfilled all the criteria of such a list, and I’m standing in a grocery store do you see my dilemma? Can you understand how tense I was at the checkout, waiting for a heavy hand to clamp down on my shoulder and a serious voice to seriously intone “Ma’am, I’m afraid we have to ask you to leave” as they forcibly steer me towards the exit, my fellow shoppers observing the scene with silent condemnation? (It never happened.)
Such paranoid contemplations really harsh the domestic groove I’ve worked so hard to reacquire. You can understand, then, why I’ve started wearing another type of perfume altogether, and I can only hope that in the future I’ll look fondly on this time as one full of happy-smelling productivity, and not cringe over the ever-increasing lows that it seems to bring about. (How? I don’t know. Let’s just imagine perfume D has previously-undiscovered hypnotic qualities.)
