Have you been keeping up with the T.R.E and F.Q correspondence?
It’s all in the study. Our letters are dear to me. Read with tenderness. Share with the ones you love.
Dear F.Q.,
How rude am I to not respond sooner! After you poured your heart out, I just let it sit. I should have scooped it up and cradled it.
I loved your letter. I think it had your desired effect on me — it tore me from the wallpaper and sent me into the garden to smell the cold dead stems. And then it sent me further afield, into the forest, to smell the cold wet earth. And then I did that day after day until the stems smelled less dead and the earth smelled less cold and suddenly we are here again, light streaming through the kitchen window and evenings that don’t feel so close. We made it. You can stop worrying about me now — I am alive again.
Scent, though. You raise good points about scent in memories and in people — how scent can trigger memories, and how keeping a scent tied to a memory is of utmost tactile importance, since it is so fragile. Nothing can smell like that thing, and when that thing is gone, the scent is gone, and the memory is gone.
Sometimes I worry about what is lost. I live my life in kept records and backups, in rewriting information and in squirreling copies into different places, so much so that I believe nothing is truly lost but rather simply eludes my searching.
But then I remember that I cannot actually access certain moments again. The Record — meaning, the Record of my life, whatever artifacts I have from my past to remind me about who I am — doesn’t hold scent as well as it does sound and vision, even if I try to include scent. I used to have a box within a box that held pear-scented soap from when I was fourteen. I bought it the last time I unexpectedly saw someone I cared about, because that’s what sentimental fourteen-year-olds do. I successfully tied a memory to a scent and could access it every time I smelled the soap. And yet, isn’t that artificial? This person did not smell like that soap. Our conversation did not smell like that soap. I finally used the soap all up a decade later because I wanted to use the box for something else. The memory is lost, but the memory of the memory remains.
At the end of the day, I am always trying to hold onto memories. I’m collecting perfume because I can use it to mark my days. Like a dog on a tree.
And there are so many smells that do not fit in boxes! Smells are connected to place, and these place scents are the ones you absolutely cannot bottle up. The scents are destroyed as places I loved are destroyed. What does that do to the memory?
My elementary school building will be demolished to make room for condos. I learned that last week. So will I never again smell the gassy boiler room of its basement? The clay in the art room, the dusty smell of the radiators turning on for the first time each year? The carrot muffin smell from the kitchen that I was always too young to explore? What about the wood in the closets where we stored our jackets? The fish food, the bird cage? What about the brass railings that would smell metallic after so many tiny sweaty palms? The packed dirt below the gravel outside the portico? What about the gym storage room? What about folding chairs smell and rubber ball smell and echoing auditorium smell? What about my teacher’s rock collection case that smelled of sulphur? What about the way the green velvet curtain on the stage would wrap you in its must if you pushed your face into it? The smell of hot computers in the computer room? What about—
I go on. I loved that building. I don’t know when its destruction will happen, but I don’t think I’ll be back in time to say goodbye. I remember those smells and memories now, but what happens when my memory fades? There is no backup hard drive for precisely how my kindergarten classroom carpet smelled like. And now I will not be able to reach that — and thinking about it, that school hasn’t been a school for years now. Of course hot computer smell isn’t there anymore. Carrot muffins haven’t been baked there in ages. So these smells are already lost to time, even if the walls of that building still stand.
Writing and poetic jumbled writing is probably the best way to remember and preserve these memories. The process of writing brings me back to those days, and here I am, leaving a Record for later, in these rambling letters. It is possible to evoke specific scents in language. Poetry is probably the closest thing we can come to preserving ephemeral scent. Next best is rhetorical questions reminding me that I smelled the thing in the first place.
And still, along with poetry and rambles, I would like also to have a box of scent to accompany each memory. I’ve tried to build these boxes. I collect soap, and lavender sachets, and beeswax candles. I ask my friends what perfumes they wear because maybe then I could invoke their presences when they are gone. My personal perfume collection is growing. A sample size is all I need, really. I wear perfume to mark the days, but I also reserve enough to keep for a later recollection — just enough to remember when I sniff a vial.
Christopher Brosius of C.B. I Hate Perfume says that there is a difference between perfume and olfactory art. Perfume we wear for others to perceive about us, but olfactory art is for one’s own experiencing. I love this idea and I also hate how it means that his fragrances are so perfect and pure and yet so weak. His scent A Memory of Kindness is a photorealistic ghost of tomato vines. Have you ever crushed tomato leaves between your fingers? It brings me back to hot days in the farm greenhouse, stringing up vines and snapping off the suckers. It makes my heart hurt to smell this smell because in the middle of winter, it is perfect summer. And yet! If I wear it, it’s gone within the hour. I could stab him for making something so perfect and yet so short-lived. The vial I have is now not for wearing, but for reserving to bury my nose in on my darkest days.
F. Q., this letter is a rambling wall of leaves and tangents. What I mean to say with this all is — thank you for writing fragrances to me. Thank you for procuring a vision of a smell in your language. It is an art I’ve not yet mastered and frankly don’t believe I will, but the trying is a beautiful journey. You brought the world to me in your writing. And yes, I do believe that this year I’ll be ready to bring myself to the world — to leave the confines of the study and venture out with you. Let’s scheme — when shall you visit? Where shall we go? What will we do on our travels? May our rambling letters turn into rambling journeys — together!
Maybe our next letters will be to other people — while we’re seated next to each other! On a train! Going somewhere!
Until our inevitable adventures,
T. R. Enchant
Perhaps next time, the study will be empty, or overthrown in a flurry of packing. It might be up to you to take in my correspondence and feed the cat and keep the ghosts company. You’re probably the most frequent visitor this study has seen in years, honestly. The walls will thank you if you keep close while I’m away.
Of course, plans are being made — it might not be for a while yet that I up and leave. But when I do, I don’t mind counting on you to keep an eye on things around here. Maybe I’ll send letters of my adventures back to you.