Someone brought a planter of hyacinths into the office earlier this week, and I've dreamed of my old church for the past three nights.
The powder-sweet smell infiltrated my subconscious, I think. Of all the senses, smell is said to be the most closely bound to memory. Did you know that losing your olfactory abilities could be a predictor of Alzheimer's? Sort of gives another dimension to the phrase, "stop and smell the roses."
I don't need to stop for the hyacinths. They sit above my desk and rain their scent down on me all day. I'll forget it for a time, the way you lose the clean bite of chlorine after a few minutes at the pool. Then, out of nowhere, I can smell them again, so thickly that I inadvertently visualize a fog of yellow pollen coating my sinuses, lining my sticky air tubes, clinging to the wetness of my lungs.
The smell delivers me into the sanctuary, sitting stiffly in a pew, trying to hike up my pantyhose without causing a scene. Glossy black flats bite the backs of my heels. My coat is in my lap, because even though it's Easter and the sun is cutting through the tall windows and threatening to burn the right side of my face, frost had grayed our yard this morning.
There is a problem with the way my memory works. The smell of hyacinths took me to church, but I did not see the purple fireworks of petals on the altar ahead of me. I felt burning sunlight and blistered ankles.
Not only that, but the memory always spirals off, into the Sunday school room where the smiling, dismissive teacher explains the sin of homosexuality, describing queer people in an abstract, alien way. He says, "there are people out there," not realizing that there are people in here, in his room, trying to love without sacrificing their eternal life.
But I say nothing.
A friend speaks up, questions whether love could ever be something that deserves damnation. The teacher asks if my friend has something to tell us, and it's a joke, and we're a room of high schoolers, and when the teacher laughs, we laugh.
My friend leaves. I stay. I regret this for years, and I think of it when I smell the hyacinth that should remind me of the arrival of spring and other joys.
That's what my brain does. It shoves aside the good memories as it dives into the depths for the dark and shameful ones. It does this at night as I process my day, repeating and repeating every conversational mistake, every occurrence of unkind thoughts, every real or imagined expression of disappointment from others. It does it when I smell sawdust and remember crying in front of a room of art students because it reminded me of my dead Pappa's barn. It does it when the heat draws up the bitter scent of asphalt and I'm transported to the second before I fainted in high school marching band, collapsing under the drums I'd insisted I was strong enough to carry.
Only with great pressure does my brain retrieve the rest of the memories.
Every kind word I share with my friends, every time I make them laugh. The shrieking joy of invading Pappa's workspace and striking him square in the back with a Super Soaker, of seeing his smile before he's even turned around. The drumline instructor jabbing a finger at the rest of the line and saying:
"Look at her! Look at how hard she works! Look at what she can do! Don't you dare let her down!"
The memories are there, down where the light can't always reach. I have to deliberately draw them up.
So do you.
There's a memory I keep under a glass jar, fending off any darkness that might force its way in.
It's summer, and I'm on an island in the Great Lakes, peddling a rented bike on hard-packed sand. I'm alone, but in the kind of way where I'm at my most whole. I tour a winery, and I'm too young to drink, so instead of wine I sample Catawba grape juice with a powder-sweet taste.
I ride past the vineyard that grew the grapes I drank. Rows and rows of vines and bunches of unripe fruit, green clusters of pearls. Hot wind shuffling broad leaves.
I reach the far end of the island and lay the bike against a dune, among hardy purple flowers. Ahead of me, water that could stretch to the end of the world, flecked with sails and diving seagulls, blue and white and flashing. My heart aches, like some force has reached from the lake and into my ribcage, grasping my soul, pulling me forward.
Barefoot, I flinch at the coldness of the water enveloping and then retreating from my toes.
I walk in, step by measured step, the cold dulling as my skin numbs. The bottoms of my shorts are wet and clinging. An errant wave pushes me up, swallowing my hips, then pulls me further out from the shore.
I smell the sunscreen washing away from my arms and the damp organic odor of aquatic plants baking on the sand. I smell the green of summer foliage and the fragile perfume of flowering weeds.
I breathe deeply through my nose before I sink beneath the surface.
