It’s pretty fascinating how our senses can bring back memories. When I say that, I mean I can hear a song and feel how I felt whenever I heard it for the first time. I have to skip songs sometimes because I become overwhelmed with emotion, good and bad. Just the other day, I was riding with the windows down because it was finally warm enough, and a smell wafted through, and it smelled just like my dad’s office whenever I got to share his lunch break with him. The other day, I heard someone’s phone ring and nearly jumped out of my skin because it was the exact sound I had set as my alarm in high school.
I am a very nostalgic person, and when I say “very,” I am not exaggerating. Most people can tell through my writing. I can find almost anything and relate it to a memory in the back of my brain. I cling to the past often; I don’t necessarily miss every detail of it, but I do enjoy reminiscing. I just feel safe whenever there is something I can think back to.
Sometimes, it’s like “I’ve been through something like this before. I can get through it again.” There’s something about being able to hear a song and having it put you at that very moment where you were blaring it out of your bedroom, laughing with your friends.
Time is just so, so strange. I know I often write about time and how easily it slips away, but y’all, it never stops. We are just constantly going, and all we have to hold onto are the memories. That’s the only way to understand time after it’s gone. We have our senses that help conjure those memories. All our feelings carry us into the past.
People often associate smells, tastes, sounds with different times of their life. I can smell a pumpkin spice candle and feel like it’s fall in the house I grew up in because that was the candle my mom always lit during autumn. I can smell “Winter Candy Apple” and feel like it’s supposed to be Christmas time. I have a perfume that I cannot spray because I wore it during the summertime. I made the best memories wearing this perfume, but I smell it and all I can think of every time I catch a whiff are those memories, and I feel an ache in my chest. Whenever I feel a cold wind chill, I think of how sad I was during the winter months of my senior year.
These triggers can be overwhelming, but I find them enjoyable. Sometimes I wish I could feel things one more time, but I do more often than I think. I live through many songs, many smells, many tastes, even deja vu. It’s wild to think that one day I’ll smell my shampoo and think of my freshman year of college, or smell a cleaner and think of cleaning the dorm. Everything I know as of now will soon be just another fond memory.
