Memory of smell

They say smell is the sense most closely tied to memory. Describe one memory of yours invoked by a particular smell.

College Writing
01/23/08

A Memory of Smell

It’s supposed to be a knee jerk reaction, not a conscious thought.
A word or phrase, and before you can blink your brain snaps to a place of reference. In my mind’s eye I can almost see electrical pulses going off as the sound of the word takes shape in my ear, neurons exchange fire, changing it from reverberation to information. Lightening bolts shoot across nerve endings, carrying the meaning to a storehouse of memories where it sets off an explosion of fireworks as it connects to
- what?

It’s only supposed to take a second, yet I’m sitting here before the shimmering screen of my laptop, trying to focus on ‘smell’ and nothing’s coming up. I feel a kind of emptiness as pulses of energy ricochet inside my brain looking for something to connect to, and I glance around the room for inspiration. My eyes land on my roommate’s bottled water, whose label proclaims its contents to have come from the ‘pure mountain springs’ of some exotic far off place.

Electricity fires somewhere in my brain, something fits, and then it’s like a thousand pieces clicking into place, one after the next. A domino effect of sensations avalanching through neuro-receptors paths, the sheer force cracking open my dorm walls of paper-mache, cardboard and spit. They split down the middle and a sky, so crystal it almost cuts, bursts in as the rest of my room melts into nothing.

My computer drops and falls away into the lush valley stretching below me like a jungle paradise. The chill morning sunrise lights up the velvet rain forested hills standing sentinels-like in reverie on all sides. I take it all in. The view from the heart of the Guatemalan mountains is a sight so beautiful it could make me believe in God if I didn’t know better.

But I do know better.

This tragic beauty is no paradise and in a second my eyes water as billowing clouds of acid white burn my nose and eyes. The social workers from our encampment are burning the trash from our pre-packaged breakfast because we are 5,000 miles from the nearest waste center or landfill. So instead all of our garbage goes up in smoke, invading the atmosphere. Not just paper cups or napkins, but plastic plates, silverware, wrappers, and - because there is no sewage system and it will not decompose with the rest of our bathroom waste - used toilet paper.

Burning shit and the smell of death and plastic, are all tossed together inside of a, now tar-like, black garbage bag that shrivels in the heat. The cut crystal sky fills with amphetamine white clouds as our trash burns and I can taste the smell of the chemical fumes in my mouth and nose.

The local boys come with their mothers to pick through our smoldering refuse. They toss aside a broken flip-flop and yesterday’s orange peels but stop to rescue an empty water bottle whose torn label proclaims its contents to have come from the ‘pure mountain springs’ of some exotic far off place. A place similar, no doubt, to the river running a dusty 15 minutes down the mountain. The remnants of it’s bathwater warm currents still dripping off my hair from my swim just hours before. When I had floated near weightless in wonder and marveled that any place could be so pure.

Now I stand feeling anything but, as I watch the toxic smoke billow from sweltering piles. I cover my nose more tightly with my bandana, the noxious smell filling my head and electricity starts to static in my brain. The children gathered around the trash heap with their mother don’t seem to mind and I wonder how they can not care as I imagine the smoke entering their mouths, swelling through their throats and crystallizing inside their lungs.

The images and the smell fuse together, darkening blue skies into black and the chemical burn in my throat is as sharp as the skyline of an industrial jungle. In the half darkness, thin bodied boys are hunched over a fire still seeking relief, but not from the cold. The small flame provides a different kind of reprieve for those to whom digging through trash for treasure is an everyday occurrence. The hot odor of lighter fluid is overpowered by the clear burn of chemical disease and I taste its sick toxin smoke turning to frost on my lungs. I can taste the plastic smell in my mouth, and I wait for the electrical pulses in my brain to turn from chaos into something pure.