EMILIA LAURA KUDELA on the nose, an unconscious archivist.
Scent has always felt like one of the most potent triggers of memory for me. Smell bypasses volition, chronology, and narrative, thrusting us instantly into the nostalgia of a past moment. It’s an involuntary exercise. You can ignore a song, you can look away from a photograph, but scent goes straight for the jugular. Before we know it, we are driven into the tender flesh of a merciless moment.
I brush the downy leaves with my fingertips. Znalazłam jedną, która już dojrzała (I found one that’s ready), my grandma sing-songs. I tug on the snap pea she’s pointing to. Impatience gets the best of me. Instead of putting it into the bowl, I break it in half and hold it to my nose. Mildly sweet, fresh, and sharply green. A backbone of earthiness. A hint of floral.
I am just a child, under the watch of my grandmother and the Northeastern Polish sun. The earth and its fruit at my feet.
Memories become technicolour under nostalgia’s spell. In archive, past moments are luminous, tainted with a significance only felt once they become the remembered. It’s an autonomously selective process; the nose curates what it wants to archive.
The nostalgic past is revisionist, never neutral. Scent becomes a kind of emotional amplifier, altering the invoked experience towards subconscious desires. Moreover, there exists an inalienable ache of something being relived in the face of fated ephemerality.
A precisely angled, studied snip. Little hairs scatter across the bathroom sink. A couple more snips. I look up to find my once-broad forehead now veiled by a flat curtain. The burnt sweetness of steam rises from the curling iron, singed keratin mixing with cheap drugstore mousse. No longer did an apple-cheeked girl stare back, but someone older and more deliberate.
I inhale again, the scent of smoke and tropical shampoo, and feel the shift take hold. Torn from an existence of conformity, I was now mysterious to others, an individuated icon with a fringe. An Alexa Chung, all eyeliner, black tights, and long legs. Or maybe a quirky, indie darling Jenny Lewis.
Smell grants memory a physical anchor, a way back into the state of the body as it once had been. It exposes how inseparable feeling is from corporality and the natural world around us, how—to our own surprise—our affective inner world is intertwined with the material.
Sat outside a pub, feeling unwanted, I take a rough drag of my cigarette. I don’t want to look blasé, and truly, I am fighting homesickness. But I can’t help the grimace on my face. My friends are inside, cheerfully sipping overflowing pints and talking too loudly.
At that moment, a girl in a red scarf and a heavy Scouse accent taps me on the shoulder, leans in, and politely asks, “do you have a lighter?” She is enveloped in opulent white florals, heavy on the tuberose, wearing none other than the surprisingly mature pick of Givenchy’s “Amarige”. It slaps me across the face: the scent I had grown up around, trailing my mother from kitchen to work to supermarket. The scent I once hated for being too intense. She looks terrified as I stare back at her.
To be caught off guard by a smell—your mother’s perfume, a lover’s cologne, the savory scent of a beloved meal—is to be briefly defenseless. Suddenly yanked into a cavernous dark, only to be blinded by the light of an elucidated memory. Scent humbles. It turns us into fragile, childlike beings, roaming the earth anew as if for the first time. It collapses time’s illusion of progress, revealing that the things we think we’ve left behind continue living, invisibly, in the world around us.
But nostalgia’s colouring is not without liability. The same yearning that comforts can also deceive. Engendered is often a deep malaise after reliving a memory, which can only exist somewhere between the real past, the felt, and the desired. Simultaneously, it is a reminder that we are tethered to a present, and must come home to it.
Perhaps then, nostalgia exists to console us for memory’s deceit. Even though we know memory isn’t entirely faithful to reality, we keep smelling backward. Yet another symptom of the human condition, to live suspended between what we know and what we feel, continuously brought inward, to look, again and again.
Featured image courtesy of Getty Images.