scent-memory: the perfume of what remains

3 scents that remind of me death, poison ivy, and Italian cologne.

I have done a reverse image search but cannot find the artist of the piece. Does anyone know? Thanks, and sorry!

Rot.

My first home was on Church Street in Rahway, New Jersey. My grandparents were still alive, just about. They lived downstairs in a small apartment; we lived above them. My bedroom looked into a powder-blue Victorian where an old woman could be seen, passing through the rooms. She was real, but she became a ghost.

These were the years when a year felt like a thousand, stretching on; nothing could be lost. My parents were still together. Everything hadn’t fallen apart yet. Summer was all mine, and it was eternal. My mother would put a plastic wading pool out front on the lawn; she could watch me from the window. In my sparkly purple bathing suit, I’d pretend I was a mermaid. I’m still a mermaid. Then I’d go into my grandparents’ house, feet all wet, and ask for potato chips and tomato juice. “I think I can arrange that,” my grandmother would say. It would be arranged. I was loved.

The Victorian had a wrap-around porch, long windows, chipped frame paint. When the old woman living there died, the city removed her belongings. The front doors were flung open as the men carried her life out to the curb. Tubes of paint and books and frilly cushions, I remember. I wanted to rummage through her life, but my mother wouldn’t let me. The scent that bled from the doorways was of rot, of mildew, of mold—a life that was old and sick and tired and lonely, and without fresh air. Nowadays, that smell is the smell of childhood, and first knowing death, the way a life can be so easily discarded. The way a house can last forever in memory.

Medicine.

As a child, I was severely allergic to poison ivy. I spent many nights in the hospital, where my mother happened to work as a nurse’s assistant. The first time I had an allergic reaction, I’d gone fishing with my father deep deep deep in the woods. By the time I returned home, what started as one red, itchy welt became full-body hives—everywhere. I had a problem breathing. I was also frightened of needles, so it took nurses and doctors and my parents to wrangle me down—screaming, exorcism-like, twisting in the ER’s white sheets—so they could give me a steroid IV. I am still that girl today; I loathe the feeling of powerlessness.

This all happened many times over the years, until the allergy sort of disappeared with age. When I was a bit older, around adolescence, I played often in the woods with friends, making elixirs for magic spells, plucking unknown plants and flowers from shrubs. These were the days when I was young enough not to fear the consequences.

I loved being outdoors, making rituals, standing under the gaping moon, threading the dandelions through my hair. I did not have a childhood of computers. Again: Giant, weeping welts formed across my face and body. Brown, peeling strips of skin would come off if I itched myself. My face was two times its size. My mother had to apply steroid cream to my whole body—but this time I was near adolescence and more aware of my body. It was the first time I felt like I had to “cover up,” and yet I was so struck with pain that I had to let her apply the lotion to my back and neck and armpits.

In bed, I asked her, “Mom, am I still pretty?”

Today, she tells me she answered yes, but she wept for me in the bathroom as my eyes were sewn shut by ivy.

The scent was clinical, sharp, intoxicating. Unforgettable. There must have been a fragrance included in the mix, because sometimes I’ll catch it on the street. Maybe it’s an additive in soap or detergent, but I when catch it on the wind I’m suddenly I’m a child again and I’m playing in the woods and I’m being loved and I’m wailing in the emergency room. It’s strangely comforting when I find the scent in the wild. It’s like time is a circle.

Acqua di Giò.

It was the year 2003. I was 17 and in foster care in a new town in a new house with new foster parents. Somehow, my then-best friend, X, and her rich family invited me to join them on their cruise to Bermuda. It was generous and dreamy and incredible. I’d never left the country, and rarely left New Jersey.

We somehow had convinced my foster parents to let me go, too, with the permission of my social worker. I still wonder how this all worked.

We sailed through darkness and emerged somewhere bright and turquoise and far away from my sorrow.

X had a brother. He was very tall and very skinny and painfully emo; I loved his long hair and his forearms as he drove his jeep and his record collection. He was broken by his neglectful but wealthy mother, and I was broken by family seperation. I found a sort of mirror in him. And then the inevitable happened. X’s brother and I snuck shots from the many cruise bars and we laid out on the deck and we danced in the ballrooms and we ate at the all-night sushi lounges and we told long stories. And then we ended up together through my first year of college.

I broke his heart.

During dinners on the cruise, X’s brother would wear Acqua di Giò. In my memory, it’s that scent and those big dining halls with the panoramic windows. All of us watching the ocean waves move us like ribbons, the expanse of dark blue like a womb. The cologne smelled like sea salt and fresh linen and sex appeal then. There was a rumor that it was formulated with pheromones; I believed it. When it lingered in the air, I felt a longing in my throat.

Today, that cologne just smells like drunken frat boys on a night out in Long Island, but for me it’s also ships at sea and winding Bermuda car rides and the long years of foster care and a boy who loved me through my darkness.

Tell me about your forever-scents in the comments below.