The Proust Effect

I was trying to find my old tumblr today, and in doing so found a friend’s post of three of us in a photobooth together, eight years ago. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I was staring at three in a row with no recollection of the moment.

I’ve never had the best memory. My middle school journals are a testament to that - impatient, hand-cramp-inducing scribbles in a hopeful attempt to remind my future self of her past versions. Huge chunks of my youth are blurry, with only one or two small moments I can pinpoint within them. Maybe it’s more common than I think. It’s not something I dwell on or pity myself for, it’s just a piece of who I am - someone who forgets easily. Luckily, many of the friendships I’ve made have lasted years, and Nostalgia is always a welcome guest during our get togethers; in those hours sitting around a dinner table, they take turns re-animating stories of the past, our laughter in a crescendo that begins to match the drink tally. In those moments, you can count on me to listen intently and laugh along, allowing them to sharpen the moments in my mind or re-create scenes I’ve totally forgotten.

But every once in a while, I rediscover a memory thanks to chance and an unexpected piece of myself - my nose. A particular soap in a public bathroom takes me back to kindergarten - after sitting on the toilet in the bathroom for what felt like hours during the first time I remember feeling shame (I pooped my pants - it happens ok!), I was washing my hands with the help of my very understanding teacher, whose name I will never remember but whose kindness I will not forget. The combination of humidity, grass, and a light breeze sits me two years into the past, outside my apartment with the summer sun tinting my inner vision a warm orange through my closed eyelids, waiting for my friends to come over just to chat for a while. Old wood floors in the new barcade transports me to my first apartment in 2017, where every Wednesday night I never felt alone because of the rowdy karaoke coming from the bar below me and the ever present possibility of a special guest appearance of a cockroach a hovering in the back of my mind. A passing whiff of a gardenia bush, and suddenly I’m an embarrassed teenager being handed that same flower by my dad, plucked from a nearby bush of a distant neighbor as drove past in his golf cart, both of us covered in a light layer of salt and dirt from the nine holes we just wrapped up.

I wish there was a vault of all the scents in the world. Maybe it does exist in some form, but maybe too it’s best that I never find it. I know I’d walk through each aisle, desperate to find the scents that bring back everything I can’t seem to remember on my own - searching for freedom from loss and trapping myself in the past instead.

So for now, I’ll wait patiently for the next sniff.

started in September 2023

last edited on November 22, 2023