#throughsmoke

Perhaps tomorrow or years from now, the fear will seem hyperbolic. But today, it feels as immediate as a bottle of milk I open to find spoiled, the rot rising in my throat.

And I have been called monstrous too. I am not unsympathetic to the hideous, artful object.

Often during a dark time, I know that I am being transformed, my heart beating against the panic of my chest, my throat not wanting to swallow. The doctor explains that this is where we get the expression to choke under pressure. Severe stress does this, he says. Globus pharyngis. When I learn about the secret meetings those colleagues have held to discuss my monstrousness, I forget to eat. Even in sleep, I remain awake. I am hypervigilant to this thing called anxiety, which settles on me invisible and present. It clings like perfume sprayed in the air which the body then walks through.

“Perfume is not a weapon of seduction but rather a shape-shifter seducer,” writes Denyse Beaulieu in The Perfume Lover. We are wooed by perfume. It vexes us. The fleeting habits of fragrance charm and irritate— What is that delicious smell? What does it make me remember? What does it make me taste? 

But why, why does the perfume disappear within an hour? This particular scent seems the very definition of desire, close and yet always just out of reach, or as Anne Carson explains, “Eros seemed to Sappho an experience of pleasure and pain. Here is contradiction and perhaps paradox. To perceive this eros can split the mind in two. Why? The components of the contradiction may seem, at first glance, obvious. We take for granted, as did Sappho, the sweetness of erotic desire; its pleasurability smiles out at us. But the bitterness is less obvious.” This fragrance is synonymous with longing because it has no tenacity. It lets go when I ask it to remain. If it lingered longer on my body, I would love it less.

The smell of cowardice. The smell of lying. The smell of mediocrity. The smell of smallness. The smell of ambitions disappointed. The smell of narcissism. He exits a room, and the rank smell of misogyny lingers. 

Writing about how she came to love the music of Joni Mitchell, Zadie Smith asks, “How is it possible to hate something so completely and then suddenly love it so unreasonably? How does such a change occur?” For me, this is the question of roses, a thing which for years I hated.

I try to locate the day in which I became a collector or, if not that, the day I began falling in love with perfume. I think it was during a year of betrayal, another dark time. Kathleen, in her answers to my questions, speaks of a seemingly bottomless grief, an emptiness that she filled with aroma, scent getting into every corner of her loss. I felt the same despair. If I hated the sound of my own crying, the curled-up shape of my body on the bed, then at least I could find pleasure outside myself. I could transform what I felt with smoke and roses.