The Scent of Home
Two boxes arrived for me today from home. Well, the place that I called home up until 4 months ago. They were filled with clothes, some things off of my dresser and items from the side table next to my bed. Well, what used to be my bed. My journals, a Kindle, an extra pair of headphones, my reading light. She was always asleep before me and my reading light would sometimes wake her up. I’d watch her turn to me in a delirious slumber and acknowledge me and my book before drifting back to sleep. She once half sleepily called me a nerd. It made me laugh. She wasn’t trying to be cruel. She liked that I stayed up reading and I liked that she would often talk to me half asleep, never remembering anything in the morning until I reminded her. A disposable camera already half filled with photos from a previous life, greeting cards that I bought for special occasions, an external hard drive, my jewelry box. Now I have a place to put my wedding and engagement ring instead of the Ziploc bag hidden in a pocket of a backpack deep in the guts of my closet. My new closet that smells like my Grandpa. One cookbook, I guess the others will come at a later time and date when we divide the kitchen. All of my extra T-shirts, the bright colored ones that I don’t wear too often, came folded nice and tidy. A few thin long sleeved tops and some heavy flannels ready to take on the Midwest winter I’ll soon be facing. Shirts I had forgotten about, but now that I see them again, I love and have missed them terribly. I take a few out and smell them. They smell like my home. Well, the place that was my home. I pull out one shirt after the next, unfolding them and holding each to my face huffing them in like a drug. I start to cry. I breathe in memories of a place I once had and loved. A home and life I thought I would be returning to. This house doesn’t smell the way my house did. My clothes smell different now. They say home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling. I feel sad that I had to say goodbye to mine. I’m desperately trying to be strong, but now all I want to do is smell the T-shirts that have been living in my closet back in California for the last 4 months. Inhaling and holding on to an aroma that sparks a memory, that triggers my heart to long for something I no longer have. Like an addict I’m chasing the high, the comfort of the way things were. I’ll keep breathing in the scent until it fades and goes away and everything starts to smell the same. But, I will never be the same.
