fragrance memories - fadila
Innocence
You hold a bottle of perfume in your hand that when sprayed, makes the air around you come alive with the smell of damp earth. A heady mix of wet soil and stewed, dead leaves that transports you into the midst of a forest. You are hunting for wild mushrooms like a character in a Tolstoy saga and when you find them, the tart smell of mushrooms ensconced in dirt takes you back to your innocent years. The first time you discovered that imminent rain had a smell you inhaled it as deeply as you could, almost to the point of dizziness, so that you would never forget it. And you never did. For years it gave you a secret thrill of excitement when you could identify that green fragrance in the air in the middle of a still afternoon and have your prediction come true. But you got older and no longer had the time to notice small things like storm scents until you found a nondescript black bottle in a shop one day, a happenstance, and it filled you with the smell of adventure. You saw yourself, aged eight, running barefoot and free on freshly rained-on grass, where you squished the clumps of mud between your toes and it tickled you with delight. It was the place where the air felt cleansed and crisp and when you closed your eyes you felt nothing but peace. You were wild but also pure and now that is the scent you cherish most.
Comfort
There are days when you want nothing else but the olfactory therapy of confectionery scents that make you feel warm and safe. You take out a bottle of pale yellow or pink and spritz a mist that lands softly on your skin. So softly it feels like petals twirling across your collarbone before settling on décolletage. The gourmand scent of sugar and salted caramel drifts decadently up at you. This fragrance is all amber at the base, of course, but there’s a rebellious hint of peppermint too. At its heart the fragrance is rich, dark cocoa and musk folded into vanilla clouds. This is the smell of choc-chip dough turning into cookies in the oven, the first hit of a newly-opened bag of fresh fudge. It’s the smell of happy conversations alongside tables full of smiling faces and cream cakes and bonbons. Comfort to you smells sweet and so you spray this on liberally when you’re far from home or the people you love or when you just want to remember the first time you shared a treat alone with your mum. The rapscallion smiles you exchanged as you finished a box of biscuits together in one sitting and you tasted your first real moment of indulgence. The unfettered sugary decadence that gave you a high like no other and the worst tummy ache of your life. But it was worth it for all the love you felt at that moment.
Friendship
The year is 2007 and the fragrance that colours your world that year is neroli jasmine. Neroli jasmine came into your life as casually as a solitary balloon sauntering by in the breeze. And casual turned intense pretty quickly, in fact, it was borderline dangerous if you’re really honest with yourself. But it was real and it was solid while it lasted. It was the best friendship you’ve ever had and to this day you haven’t forgotten it. Neroli jasmine was a savage floral, she was dark and feisty and unpredictable at the base but her heart was all sweetness and softness. The scent bloomed in the summer under a sun that was so hot your armpits were always sweating and she let you use her roll-on deodorant in the tiny bathroom in a run-down part of town. You remember the night you tried your first cigarette and felt so faint and nauseous, you threw up into a bin in a parking lot while neroli jasmine held your hair and rubbed your back. You were mirrors. You were yourself with neroli jasmine the most bare-faced, exposed self you’ve ever been with anyone before or since. You laughed, cried, shouted, sang, fell down and got back up together. You tasted freedom and transition side by side, a pair of perfectly, poised hooligans. You loved neroli jasmine but the bottle of perfume lasted longer than the friendship. Now every once in a while when you pass by a fragrance store, a ribbon of neroli jasmine floats out to greet you and you know in a parallel universe somewhere, your friendship lives on.
Fadila Henry is a South African. Her writing has been published in Dear Damsels and Lady Lit Magazine. You can find her on Twitter.