Life for me has always been made of scents. Of smells that emerge and unsettle you. Of thoughts that cling to a single fragrance molecule, to a particular accord, lingering not only on your clothes but in your memory.
Like the scent of me embracing my mother on a cold winter night, when she came home from work and her coat carried the faint smell of smoke, along with the crisp note of the winter air woven into the worn leather of her jacket.
Other scents are crafted, like fragrances the people around you wore that somehow endure through time. And so, even today, every now and then, as I walk and catch a trace of Davidoff in the air, I find myself standing at a traffic light on a gray autumn day, with adolescence still in my heart, my whole life ahead of me, and no idea what I wanted to do with it.
Perfume is a peculiar kind of clothing: something you wear, and that you unknowingly make others wear as well.
For them, it becomes a postcard from another time, a portal to a memory that is vivid and tangible.
But, as with so many things in life, we never know which scents will stay with us, which ones will come to carry memories and longing.
We’re unaware to their impact in our future.
In the moment we experience them, they are only passing fragrances, just as every moment of life passes and disappears.
Yet later, like so many of them, they remain with us, ready to be recalled, longed for, or mourned.
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