Rachael Inciarte
Olfactory
I lost my sense of smell and then things got weird. I didn’t realize before how much my experience of the world was filtered through my olfactory medium. But, on the other side of anosmia, I can testify that it was a lot.
During one college summer I worked at a tea shop. My job was to run the shop’s stand at a local farmers market where smells were plentiful. In every direction wafted flowers bouquets, bread loaves, and loam-coated vegetables; our teas of jasmine, lemongrass, and hibiscus. I used to sit there like Ferdinand the bull, sniffing until I felt high on aromas. Once, an angry woman even accused the stand, and me as the vendor, of being an illegal dispensary. She yelled at me over sun-brew while onlookers laughed at her. I think she really just wanted weed and was unconvinced by the display of looseleaf.
But the first thing that I noticed, or failed to notice, after losing my smell was the candles. I’ve always been a candle person; by that I mean I buy and use a lot of candles. I have notifications set for holiday candle sales and a bathroom cabinet of candles stocked. In case you misunderstand me, I’m not talking about the wax sticks meant for power outages, or votive intended tea candles. My preferred candles are single wick or three wick or wood-wick; they can be soy or beeswax or paraffin, but they are unequivocally required to be scented.
Here’s what I’ve observed—there are two distinct families of candle scents: food and floral smells. Both notes can appear in a single candle, but one will always be thrown forward. Cinnamon versus sandalwood, or lemon over lilac. I like the food aromas best and I especially prefer the cloying sweetness of scents like gingerbread spice, toasted marshmallow, and vanilla almond. The more it smells like something fresh from the oven, the better.
Strong, saccharine smells are my favorites and I’ll admit that it got a little weird when my kids were born. Babies smell, and not just their diapers. Their scalps emit a heady perfume that is intoxicating—at least to me, as their mother. I remember actually salivating over my son’s forehead, and sticking my nose at the yawn of his mouth to inhale his milky breath. My daughter, I swear, was born with a scent like Belgian waffles—liege, with crystalized sugar baked in. Even as they age and use shampoos that should mask them in coconut or strawberries, if I shoved my nostrils past their hairline then I could sometimes still reach the mysterious fragrance.
Overnight I couldn’t perceive any of that. Not their fuzzy heads, not a dirty diaper. Lighting a candle no longer ignited joy. What was the point if I couldn’t conjure a cozy bakery atmosphere? I hadn’t expected odor to make that much difference. There are a few benefits to the sudden blank page where my fifth sense should be—garbage no longer makes me gag, diaper changes don’t stink, and I can finally use natural deodorant.
Natural deodorant is great for not giving your armpits cancer, but not useful if you want to smell good. I’ve tried several, all horrible. The best one of a bad bunch is supposedly scented mandarin, but has the musk of a wet dog—like the time our dog rolled in the grass after the sprinklers turned on, then trailed muddy manure all over the house. But now I can wear aluminum free deodorant and if I reek then that’s other peoples’ problem, not mine.
I recall smells in the same hazy way I remember my kids’ births. I can replay it like a film, watch myself scream and break and circumnavigate a kind of death… but the memory is a mirror, not a pond. I reach and my fingers meet only the surface, there’s no depth behind the sense. I can conjure up the likeness, but not access the ‘feels-like,’ and what that feels like is actually theft. If smell is tied to memory then how do I keep my memories knotted, stop them from the sieve? What if, without it, what I end up forgetting is everything important?
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Rachael Inciarte is an American writer living in Spain with family. Rachael holds an MFA in Fiction from Emerson College. Their work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and features in Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Nimrod, among others. Finishing Line Press published their chapbook of poems, What Kind of Seed Made You, in 2022.