it’s unbelievable how your sense of smell can just whip you right back to a particular time and place from out of the blue. this morning, i was walking down the street on my way to the tube, and suddenly got a whiff of perfume from the woman walking in front of me.

and suddenly I was 13 again. you see, for a while during puberty, i was obsessed with fashion magazines. i pored over them as if somehow i could become thinner, more beautiful through osomosis, just by reading them, or figuring out what the right outfit to wear was, or finding the perfect kind of makeup to hide my awkward ugly duckling stage. i thought there was some kind of magic in those pages, and i desperately wanted it to rub off on me, transform me into anyone but the gawky teen i was. and not just any regular teen fashion magazines. not “seventeen” or “ym” like my friends read. no, i read “vogue” and “glamour”, and particularly “elle” – which were largely just catalogue-sized advertisements for a lifestyle i couldn’t even begin to dream of affording. slick photos of the jewelry and tans and couture of the elite. yet i longed – not so much to look like the models, or wear the clothes… i probably couldn’t have put what i longed for into words, but it was undoubtably linked to a desire for comfort and confidence in my own skin. something which i wouldn’t find for many more years. something which, even now somedays, i have only a tenuous grip on.

and when i was 13, i still went to church every sunday with my parents. how very pedestrian, i know, but true. i was a regular churchgoer against my will. and after the service was over, my parents inevitably had some sort of coffee club or meeting to attend, or just wanted to hang around talking to their friends for hours about things i couldn’t have cared less about. as a 13 year old, i just wanted to get as far away from the scene of embarassment as quickly as possible. so i would ask my dad for the keys to the car, and i would go to the drugstore and spend $3 of my babysitting money on the glossy and seductive “elle” magazine, and go study it in the back of our family minivan, while waiting. waiting for my dorky parents to tear themselves away from the dorky church. waiting to escape my geeky suburban life. waiting to be free of the adolescent angst which i couldn’t even name but carried around with me in my spine everyday. waiting to be a swan.

the point of all this, is that “elle” always had a certain perfume sample in it with a very distinctive smell. i wish i could remember the name of it now, and i was more than half tempted to stop the woman this morning and ask her what scent she was wearing. but that smell this morning transported me from a 32 year old woman in London to a 13 year old girl in the back of a minivan in Boston, in the blink of an eye.

and it kind of blindsides you to know that you can suddenly feel that way again without any kind of considerate warning, with no control over when or where it happens. and it’s unnerving to know that our emotions only remain hidden at the whim of our senses and memories, that they can surface so suddenly and acutely, and that they’re only a whiff away.

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