Far Away Look In Her Eyes

I wish I knew so many things. Like what life was like before languages, how many years we really have left on earth, how paper is made, or how computers work. Things we know the answer to. I want to know a lot of other things too, like how a heart knows when to beat, where we go when we die, and if hell is real.

But right now, more than ever, I want to know if time travel is simpler than it looks. Because I think I time travel all of the time.

The other day I was riding my bike through the park and I caught a whiff of something vastly familiar, and although I was still riding my bike in mid-April 2020 my mind was some day in August 2003, on my first day of Middle School.

I am walking to the front of my homeroom class to introduce myself like we all had to do. I had just rehearsed over and over in my head how I’d greet my classmates, some new faces while others old Elementary School friends, after a long summer break. Someone is laughing, and I am so anxious that I think it is about me, but I am also so excited that I think it’s probably not about me. Optimistically scared. I sit down on the stool facing the class and my heart is beating so fast and loud, I swear everyone can hear it. And I am wearing eye liner for the first time so I am worried it has already melted into the deep sets of my eyes and maybe that’s why they laughed? Or maybe I missed a patch shaving the back of my legs? I thought about the small pit stains on my grey t-shirt, were they visible? Did someone see my pit stain, point it out, and now they’re all laughing at me? I am heavily perspirating, but I only smell one thing.

Reader, I shit you not. I had a scent memory triggered by my Dove deodorant. I had just lifted my sleeve to wipe the sweat streaming from under my helmet while on my 3rd loop through City Park, and upon a panting inhale of my armpit I took a step through time and space, and felt a feeling that I’d felt before as if I was really there.

I started to laugh a bit, mostly at the memory of being so worried. I don’t even remember who was in that class. My old neighbor? He was my friend. Why was this, of all the years wearing Dove deodorant, the prominent memory that surfaced; like a scuba diver that shot up too fast and got the bends; a loose hallucination.

But then another memory came passing through, like I stepped from one memory to another, as if they were train cars. This memory was from a few years ago when my cousin Molly told me she’ll never forget me drying my armpits in the small fan in my bedroom after applying deodorant. How I would stand in front of the mirror, smear each pit a few times, and then hold up my arms in front of the cool breeze before putting my shirt on. When she explained it to me, I didn’t remember doing it, but I remember why I did it: I didn’t want any deodorant stains. I heard that could happen if you don’t dry your pits before putting your shirt on. I was new to wearing deodorant, and I didn’t want to mess up. Because that’s what you do when you go to middle school; you start shaving your legs, you begin wearing make up, and you have to use deodorant. But you can’t mess up. It was someone else’s memory of me, and it still provoked a wave of panic trying to reason with worry.

And I don’t know how I got here; at what time I sat down and opened my computer and let my fingers dance across the keyboard. I want to know what has happened in that time, how many memories have whistled passed me, but I’ve been so preoccupied zooming in on a specific moment in time that others have seemingly fluttered by; the train has left the station. I want to know if, by reading this, you joined me on my time traveling journey and maybe had a few trips yourself.

I want to know how time both slips away from us and follows us like the ticking alligator in Peter Pan.

I want to know why I think I’m writing something reasonably profound, when really all I did was quite windily explain scent memory, using a bunch of metaphors, and talking about my armpits.