The smell of a ghost

I planned to start this blog post by describing a smell that’s eluded me for a lifetime, but I have no idea how to explain a scent through text. There’s no way for me to activate your scent receptors, make you feel the way I feel when I experience this scent, and that honestly saddens me to an existential degree. As is said in The Aroma of Righteousness by Deborah Green, we lack the “aesthetic lexicon” to accurately convey the sensory experience of smell. Nonetheless, although I can’t give you a smell through the internet, I’m going to try my best.

I don’t know when I first smelled this mystery scent, but I can’t help but feel that it’s been around me since I was young. It’s distinctively floral, but not as sweet as other flowers typically smell – it has a grungy, hay-ey aspect to it – almost like the smell of a wheat field. I guess that’s why the smell conjures such a specific image in my mind.

When I smell the scent, I’m forced to recall an image from my mind that’s equally, if not more, mysterious than the smell itself. I see a small shop in the middle of a yellow field, along a tan dirt road. The whole image is yellow to an extent, washed out but comforting. What the shop sells, I have no idea, but the store’s interior glows in white fluorescence, white linoleum floors bordered by wooden racks of whatever is being sold in this space outside of time. I have no idea where this image came from, but I see it vividly each and every time I have this experience. Was this a place I’ve been? Is this a false memory? If it is, how come I recognized the image as something from my childhood, something I felt nostalgia for without knowing why? Where did this ghost of a memory come from?

The worst part, however, is that I only learned where the smell came from a few days ago. I’ve been hunting it for ages, taking a pause every time to try and ascertain where it’s coming from, never able to spot the culprit. That brings us to a few days ago when I went for a brief walk around my old neighborhood. As I made my way down a long, empty road, I caught the scent and stopped walking instinctively – and, turning to my right, spotted a yellow patch of flowers outside a large house.

I took a deep breath in, and I finally finished my journey – I’d identified the scent that haunted me for ages, ending a lifelong path – and yet, I didn’t feel any different. It was somewhat bittersweet, in fact, to take the mystery out of my favorite smell. I wonder if it’d be better to have never identified it and kept the scent with an air of mystique.

I guess the takeaway of this blog post is that the smell of Japanese Andromeda kicks ass. Smell it some time.