A Memory in Mist

"But then you came in, and we locked eyes. You kicked the ashtray over as we came toward each other. Stubbed my cigarette out against the west wall. Quickly lit another Look at that. Would you look at that? We're throwing off sparks. What will I do when I don't have you to hold onto in the dark?"

So I'm new to the community as a whole but fragrances are something wildly important to me as someone with a visual disability. I've been legally blind since I was thirty and had severely diminished vision since I was eighteen. Scent plays a very important role in my day to day life, as it does with everyone else, but my scent memory has tied in where my visual memory ducked out.

A smell plays out an experience in our minds and it's a beautiful thing. Maybe you catch a whiff of a laundry detergent and remember a bad first date. Perhaps a burning cigarette stub brings forth the time you were dumped harder than a concrete mixer emptying its payload. You were there. It was real. Today, pi reminds me of the first time I sat down and really, truly, listened to 'Tallahassee' by the Mountain Goats rather than just hearing it.

Pi had just become my go to scent for existing on the whole and I was an angst filled twenty one year old in my junior year of college. Life was practically a quarry with how rocky it was at the time but we take solace where we can find it. For me, it was music, cooking, fragrances, and smoking cigarettes in between classes (don't smoke, I'm eleven years free and it only seems cool, promise). I had Tallahassee on my iPod since i got the things but I never really learned to appreciate the album until things started to get hectic in my life and I was truly all on my own. Bad ideas dancing around in there, all of them, all of them.

In between bad relationships, packs of Marlboro red 100's, and sneaking off to the practice rooms on my campus for a 2AM piano session, there were a few calms. A few stable outlets. A few hobbies to ground me down. I was drowning, there was no sign of land, you were coming down with me, hand in unlovable hand. But every day started and ended the same way: Wake up, spray pi. Come home and let pain or pleasure decide why I'm screaming into a pillow that night.

Today, though, I'm brought back fully to a relaxing memory in a chaotic storm. The first time I really listened to Tallahassee. The first time I -got it-. The first time I really understood how a person takes so much pain and joy and turns it into music. Why a person could be driven to do so. Outlets like music aren't just hobbies, they're how we release and realize the emotions too complex or too embarrassing to work out in conversation with another human. A sharp breeze kicks up, I hugged myself hard, how come there's peacocks in the front yard?

Alone in my room, ipod dedicated to this album, lying on my bed after eight hours of classes and a four hour IT shift, my body just vented out everything that was too much for me to place on another person. The music went in one ear and grabbed everything horrible going on and marched out with what it could carry.

The album finished and there was only me and the silence made by something waiting to be said. I grabbed my guitar and I wrote one of the few songs I would ever actually be proud of. Something I wouldn't just cringe at. Something I wouldn't play and think: 'fuck me, this is trying way too hard to be music'. Something freeing. Something made of the pieces of me I can't release upon the world safely through any means other than music.

Today, that's what this smell reminds me of. The simple exits of chaos found only when we pay full attention to the storms we're trying to avoid. I hope whatever storms you're riding through have easy exit spouts.

"The stage is set, someone's gonna do something someone else will regret. I speak in smoke signals and you answer in code. The fuse will have to run out sometime. Something here will eventually have to explode."