I am pretty certain that the time of the pandemic caused by COVID-19 is going to generate a flood of essays. Humans find it essential to express their frustration, nostalgia, ways of pass time, and aspirations. I am no different and here I am trying to express the thing that I miss most. Most of all I miss the smell of strangers.
As we spend time in our confined spaces, the smells that we experience daily become conventional. The smell of grounded coffee, while distinctive occurs regularly every morning, becoming a routine. My perfume, while invigorating, is redundantly familiar and becomes customary in a matter of minutes. My special evening treat - aroma candle, is rapidly losing its appeal. What I miss most is not the pleasurable smells in terms of caliber, but rather the unpredictability and lovely of olfactory experiences. The irritating smell of a stinky gasoline truck. The sweet and sour smell of sweat in the subway. The smell of worn-out leather in the back of a taxi cab. The someone’s “too flowery” perfume as they share an elevator with me. I miss the strange smells that catch me off-guard and make me take notice.
While confinement due to the pandemic has deprived us of multiple unexpected senses like vision and touch, I will argue that smell is the hardest to simulate in our dwellings and hence the most pensive. While I miss the outside noises of my city, I currently have access to most of the music ever produced by humans. Besides, through cinematographic experiences varying from short vlogs to movies, I can encounter most of the sounds I yearn for - the whisper of leaves in the forest, the cringing of snow during winter hikes, the energetic typing sounds in the offices. The same can be said about the visual experience: while my visual range is bound mostly to white walls of my apartment, different mediums constantly entertain my visual senses. I can take virtual tours in the museums, scroll through pictures of friends and strangers across costal media, attend a performance at MET opera. Not to mention the variety of visual stimulation from a myriad of movies from classics to blockbusters. Which makes me to explicitly state the obvious: the enforced lockdown could not have been so good in any other decades. In the times, when people owned either tv with select content and specific viewing times or did not have anything at all (basically pre-19th century) all of the senses would have put humans on a very different kind of trial.
So back to the thing that it seems I miss most. There is no way to easily access foreign smells in the privacy of one’s apartment. Even if you frequently open the windows. The lack of small simulations is caused by the human inability to capture them in the first place. While I can get a new perfume, it is hard for me to capture the smell of the fresh paint in the classroom at the beginning of the school year, upon return from summer vacation; the smell of my favorite bakery right after they produced the fresh batch of croissants or the smell of the forest in that particular part of a mountain range in the middle of Peruvian Andes. Psychologists have shown time and time again the easiness with which smell captures our memories. I frequently choose a different perfume for different prolonged chapters of my like and loathe partying with empty perfume bottles, since even one sniff from the old smell can instantly bring the memories of a particular period. Yet, besides perfume bottles, there is little left for me to re-experience the places, other than to physically return to them, hoping that they have not changed much and still smell the same.
Here is another complication to my reminiscence - on most of my current outings I am required to wear a mask. My mask is a regular dust mask, but its fabric has a very distinct smell. So my mask deprives me of the full of “strange smells” on my rare grocery outings. Since it is my personal belief that the masks will persist as a required outfit for a while (at least in New York City), that makes me crave strange odors even more. Ironically, the smell of my dust mask will be another one of the smells that will capture a specific memory at a particular period of time.
As the whole world has shut its doors with devastating consequences for the well-being of millions of people, each one of use is planning to take note but this transformative experience, promising to appreciate it more. And while there is no certainty when the streets of our cities will be crowded again, I am hopeful that this July in the crowded card of New York Subway on the hot August afternoon, I am going to be deeply inhaling the smells of strangers and smiling.