Olfactory Time Travel
an instant expanded to pleroma
I am getting fuel.
A train horn blares across the street. A fighter jet screams overhead. The traffic from the interstate roars.
It is the choir of industry.
The concrete at this pump is blackened, pocked with baseball-sized voids. A fire in the recent past. I look up and see flashes of a rusted corrugated roof through the gaps between the train cars. Beyond the fuel pump a bright white metal building has been half stripped to its bones by a windstorm some years ago.
The tapestry of labor.
As fuel starts to pump, the pungency of gasoline washes away the acrid smell of burn that clings to the ground and pillars. This dominates my senses until a cloud of odor from a passing cattle hauler wafts over me, flooding away the petroleum haze.
The incense of toil.
I get chills at how familiar it all is. How this particular combination is a blueprint of the place I am from.
It is equally inspiring and debilitating. To know profoundly this combination of things unlocks something in me. To acknowledge it isn’t daffodils and saffron, violins and laughter on the breeze.
All of the sights, sounds and smells appeal to me in a sad way. A boy born by a distorted world.
Of this cacophony of experience, it is the odor of cattle that gives comfort. Perhaps that is its organic source. The one thing closest to what life was supposed to be.
Only in less distilled portions.
I used to hate the smell of cattle trucks. Now, it reminds me of Home. Reminds me of the country. It represents a time of life that was simpler, if not easier. When happiness was easier to find. Or at least Hope was.
It was a time of life when there was the illusion of more potential. More to look forward too. I feel like I’ve reached a place where there is only one hope left.
And I can’t get there except through patience. I can’t force it, I just have to wait.
Older hopes felt like places I could go, people I could see, things I could do—or learn to. But those have all either been done, they are gone, or they are just beyond my grasp.
It feels like now in life that nothing will bring satisfaction. There is no escaping who I have become. My perceived momentum. All I can do is tolerate.
I miss the smell more when i’m someplace busy, like the city and I pass a truck.
A lot of people think it’s gross. It probably is. All that cow poop and dander.
I don’t know—it takes me someplace. A place that doesn’t exist anymore.
And probably never did.
But I wish I could go there anyway.
#childhood #essay #memoir #journal #100DaysToOffload #writing
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Thank you for coming here and walking through the garden of my mind. No day is as brilliant in its moment as it is gilded in memory. Embrace your experience and relish gorgeous recollection.
Into every life a little light will shine. Thank you for being my luminance in whatever capacity you may. Shine on, you brilliant souls!
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