the power of scent

 my earliest memories with my mother are always in the car. she would drive me to school. this was our alone time.

i can remember listening to the b-52s, listening to the aladdin soundtrack. i can remember what the tape looked like, with it's pale milky plastic. a blue honda civic with the blue fabric seats. i remember the graffiti on the overpasses for some random reason. i've never told anybody that.

but the thing i remember most is a smell. the smell of my mother chewing gum, after drinking her coffee. she had a serious caffeine addiction, if she didn't have coffee, she would cripple under a headache. this is still true today but i remember it from childhood.

the smell of her chewing gum after coffee, the smell of the morning. the car had manual windows that you would roll with a crank.

many years later, in an upstairs bedroom, i would kiss my first older woman. 

i was maybe 9, 10, 11 and she was 15-16. she was from argentina. it was such an odd pairing and totally accidental. i felt something for her that i didn't have words for and maybe she was just exploring on a whole different continent but we kissed in my sisters closet and i can remember the way her mouth tasted ( like smoke) and i liked it a lot but also i didn't want more. imagine that. it's hard to imagine it now. when you remember things it changes them. writing this down will change the memory for me. but also i have a polaroid of us holding hands at the ice skating rink, she's nearly double my height.

now it's a different smell i look for. womanness means something soft. i want to smell the familiar warm bedsheets, the quietest parts of the neck. 

my life has turned out to be so much less than i thought it would be.