Words: Savannah Meriwether (she/her)
We all have those scents. The ones that sever any mind-body connection and fling our thoughts far into the past – into some distant place that we haven’t been to in a while.
My high school boyfriend’s most prolific collection of physical objects was his shelf of cologne. His room was very minimal otherwise; beyond the little army of bottles he didn’t have many things in his space. At first, I didn’t understand the appeal, but I grew to find his genuine enthusiasm towards the hobby incredibly charming. He would excitedly list off the top and bottom notes for each of them and always asked for my opinion when he got a new one. For the year and a half we dated, despite the plethora of options, my clear favourite of his ever-growing stash remained Viktor & Rolf’s Spice Bomb: Extreme. The name is ridiculous, trying too hard to be masculine to be tasteful, but I suppose it’s accurate enough. Anytime I borrowed a hoodie or a shirt it would smell like spiced vanilla and comfort. It would settle into the threads and remain for weeks, the scent getting warmer and deeper as time went on.
We ended up breaking up because I was too depressed to be present in a relationship, but now that I’m a bit older I think I was lucky to have him as a first love. In a time when I was so desperate for the present to fade into memory, with him I remember never wanting moments to end. I’d never smelled that cologne on anyone other than him for years. It was a whole, unfragmented association. Once we stopped seeing each other, the only time I encountered the scent was in the sample section of Sephora. At the time – if anyone asked me to my face – I would have vehemently denied that I missed any of that relationship, but every time I walked out of that shop doused in Spice Bomb I was exposing my own lie (even if no one other than me knew it).
Within the first few months of moving abroad I passed three different people on the street or at work who were wearing it, and by then I had stopped seeking it out in every beauty supply store I set foot in. The first time it happened, I was just stepping off of the tube when my olfactory senses were hit with that old, nostalgic rush of tobacco and spice. My whole body stilled in an instant. In those few seconds, I was transported back to his room, blasting Paramore and binge-watching movies. We all have those scents. The ones that sever any mind-body connection and fling our thoughts far into the past – into some distant place that we haven’t been to in a while.
That time, I was caught so off guard that it depleted my mood for the entire day. I kept thinking about him, and all the things I’d done wrong, and all the stereotypical, but messy and real, pain of being a teenage girl learning what love is supposed to mean. Through a chance passing of a stranger, I was forced to confront a period of my life that I had assumed I’d let go of fully. With physical souvenirs, any memory attached to them only comes forward with intentional recall. You hold the object in your hand and remember finding it in the depths of an antique shop, or being handed it wrapped in tissue paper on Valentines Day. Bodily senses, though, are entirely transportive. You can get lost in the nostalgia of a photograph or the tacky keychain attached to your backpack, but when the song that you listened to on loop when you first developed a crush comes on the radio? Are you able to resist the pull into the mind of your younger, untested self? If you can, then you’re stronger than I am. More by The Greeting Committee never fails to make me feel 16 and obsessed again – obsessed with the first time feeling of someone else’s clothes on my body, obsessed with falling asleep in a house that wasn’t mine, obsessed with a boy who wouldn’t last forever but would last long enough.
It’s been a few years, and I now have my own bottle of Spice Bomb: Extreme. I wear it nearly everyday, though I do have a bit of a perfume collection myself now. It still feels like comfort. Sometimes it reminds me of him, but most of the time all I think is ‘Wow, I smell fucking incredible,’ because, after all, it has always been my favourite cologne. I doubt the association will ever fully go away, especially because he was the first person I ever kissed and no one ever really forgets that, but it’s no longer a scent that automatically rips me into the past. Now, I’ll wake up each morning, and I’ll continue to don my spicy cologne and dance towards the future.
