By Norah Rami
1. The black sweatshirt I brought home from Goodwill smells like someone’s bedroom. I don’t know whose face or body, but I know this smell—vague enough to be remembered but specific enough to remain unnamed. In all reverence to modern hygienic practices, I recognize I should wash this, yet it feels blasphemous to erase its past. And yes, in time it will slowly fade out of existence to be replaced by my own unholiness. But for now, I can imagine a dark bedroom, carpeted with clothes on the floor. And I can wear another skin for a moment.
2. There is an in-between where this sweatshirt will be both mine and its forefather. Neither of us have any inkling of the other, yet we have come together to create something new. I do not know who I am melding with. And they do not know their child.
3. I hope this faceless lover is kind. This sweater is an embrace she never knew she gave but I cherish it nonetheless. Perhaps she would love her child if she knew of her.
4. I often give my friends the clothes off my back. Once I slept at Mango Sunrise’s house when the power went out and it was too cold to stay at home. The next morning, I gave her the hockey jersey I wore to sleep, the only thing I brought in my hurry. I had a second one just like it at home and this was my token of thanks. She’s leaving next year and won’t bring it with her.
5. Do they smell me in the fabric of these gifts? Is there a part of me living in those seams?
6. The idea of love is based on pheromones. It’s less love at first sight, more love at first smell. In a 1998 study, 44 men wore a cotton t-shirt for two days, then left those t-shirts in a room for 49 women to choose. They found that the women were attracted to the shirts of men with the strongest genetic immunity. By scent. Their noses looking for a mate with whom they could create the strongest child, least susceptible to disease. It’s less about who they are, more what they can create. I wonder if the women ever met their shirt-wearers. Did they fall in love?
7. I am hoping for both yes and no. There is a certain callousness if that is all that’s left in love. That we marry a $2.99 cotton shirt before we meet the wearer. If our own noses can betray us, what can we trust in love?
8. I don’t know what I would do in this experiment. Perhaps I would circle the room lost, following my sisters to their cotton treasure. Perhaps there is a part of me that is the daughter my mother wanted. Perhaps there is an instinct that knows her duty even when her heart betrays her lineage.
9. My mother hates her nose. Says she’s wanted a nose job since she was ten, but forty years later she still holds disgusted claim to her original. I find it beautiful. She inherited it from her mother, and curse or not, I’d still rather share their lineage.
I am told my nose is like my father’s but softer, lacking the definition of his features yet retaining the same form beneath. I never noticed my nose much. I draw my finger down my dorsum in a clouded restroom mirror. It is plain, neither a point of pride nor hatred. I have much else left to disdain.
10. A 2005 study at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden found that while the majority of women react to the pheromone androstadienone (AND), a select number of women react to estratetraenol (EST), the same hormone reacted to by most heterosexual men. to. A 2017 study by the University of Western Australia disproved the role of AND and EST in attraction. Science often fails me, but I still wonder which I would react to, if it even matters.
11. In 8th grade English class, a boy comes up to tell me his friend thinks I smell bad. I want to tell him my scent is not made for him.
12. Chamomile just got a nose job. The first two nights she tells me she was haunted by death, waking in the night, unable to breathe. She says she was happy she did this, waltzing on the precipice of life for love of her new nose. We sit on opposite ends of my couch as she says this, watching a movie whose summary I’d later read because I missed everything except a couple of stolen kisses. I don’t point out that her new nose is not in fact new but the same nose with a different aesthetic value because I don’t think of this until two days later, when I’m waiting for her to text back.
13. I once had a dream that smelled so strong I woke up. There was a woman in a dark saloon who swore she loved me. But as I turned to face her there, I found no one, instead alone, bathing in the stench of liquor. I sat in my bed trying to remember what that love smelled like before it disappeared.
14. I sat in Mahogany’s car while she complained about the price of perfume. Her AC spun a sickly storm of weed and Febreeze, fighting for who would stay, who would go. Neither wins. A child of disorder, translucent skin and a sewn mouth, sinks behind our ears and into our hair.
At that moment I was still in love with her, even though I knew she would never love me back. She knew it too, which is why she spoke about perfume and birthdays. She was born a day before me. She was always in a rush, working more jobs than she could remember. Maybe that’s why it would never work. She told me she’d think about love when she quit her next job. But she always found another one. She never had enough time to breathe. I wonder what she would smell if she stopped for a moment and inhaled. Maybe, that’s what she’s running from.
15. I am sitting on Chamomile’s couch petting her dog when she tells me they used to break the bone in rhinoplasties. Now they split the skin and shave it down. Progress is not disfigurement, but the slow scraping away of those parts best hidden away.
16. For all of middle school I used a peach-scented Bath and Body Works body spray. I kept it in my gym locker with a gray top and black shorts that hadn’t been washed since basketball season began. I really believed dousing myself in perfume would hide all my dirty laundry.
17. For Mahogany’s going away party I bought her a candle. We had gone shopping at Target a month before to satisfy her sudden need to set something on fire. That day, we couldn’t agree on a scent; I gravitated towards the sweet, her towards the woody. The day of her party, I spent an hour at Bath and Body Works trying to distance myself from my own body, to get closer to hers. To smell as she might smell, to be closer for a moment to a space I could not inhabit. I ended up buying a scent I could not stand. She loved it.
18. Ice hockey practice always ended in sweat. I would suffocate in my stench in that echo chamber of a pink-painted closet because there weren’t enough girls to warrant a real locker room. There was something comforting in those moments of isolation. I would sit a little longer in the stink, not daring to borrow perfume or AXE to cover it.
19. We can’t smell ourselves unless we really try. We smell our own bodies so much, they become undetectable. But in those nauseating moments, I knew I existed.
20. I have been told I smell like Michael’s in the fall, honey and orange juice, vanilla and peaches, good and bad.
21. I think I smell like the sea spray of an ocean storm, the sweat of held palms, summer nights when the air is heavy enough to force you to slouch, the earth re-awoken after a heavy rain.
22. Three years after quitting hockey, I found my old bag. I opened it to memories of a sickly pink closet and the girl who sat within, yearning to find herself. I found solace in the memories until I had to douse them in bleach and sell the bag to some kid in Ohio. The scent must still linger, even if it’s no longer mine. I wonder if they found beauty in it too. Perhaps they think of me.
23. I kept the jerseys. They’re all I have left of me.
24. I go for runs in the morning and suck in breaths of sweat just to remember. Some days, I fall asleep under the sun and awake to find my ghost resurrected by the hot summer air.
25. On rainy days, I wrap my hair in a towel and step outside to smell our magnolia trees. I go alone, dancing in the puddles until my reflection becomes a work of art. I find sweet and earth in this ritual. I worship the magnificence I do not notice until I focus on the inhale, stick my nose deep into the petals stained white with pollen, and breathe.
26. There is something special in finding a smell alone. Here it is pure, only tainted by the remnant of me. It’s less a stain, rather the creation of birth. All there is to find is myself and the beauty in the world.
27. In these moments, I breathe as I breathe and hold for a moment an undefinable scent that only I can name as my own.
The Woodlands 