I awoke to a singular bleep that seemed to come from the membrane between wakefulness and sleep, a state where perceptual phenomena cannot be traced to either realm. I checked my carbon monoxide alarm, inspected the boiler (for what, idk, a desperate mechanical groan). Side effect of anosmia is you don’t know if you are going to perish by smoke (this came to light when the building next door to mine was on fire, there were trucks of firefighters hosing it down with water, I couldn’t smell anything even with the window open), let alone gas. Carbon monoxide is pretty much odourless anyway. You have to rely on your landlord’s possibly obsolete detection technology. I flung open all the windows. I had Covid again last week and tried to remember the last two times I was quarantined in the same flat: long phone calls pacing around, screaming every time I had to sit down because of the muscle pain in my legs, watching German television shows about drug-loving teenagers, getting the same results.
I don’t understand what’s happened to my sense of smell. The doctor prescribed regular Beconase nasal spray, the shit I’ve been using all my life for hayfever. Daily use over several months led to nosebleeds and headaches. I tried salt water rinsing, voluptuous inhalations of the steam exhaled by menthol crystals. Yesterday, I was walking through Shawlands and stopped to rub lavender between my thumb and forefinger. Brought fingers to my nose with the tenderness of someone first applying the buttercup method, somewhere else. I could smell the lavender. Just about.
When I was small, we’d sneak in the back way to a big National Trust park where you could go to the Walled Garden. Mum would point at the various herbs and name them. She’d say to rub them between your thumb and forefinger and we’d do that to save picking them and being caught. Sometimes I’d press them between pages of notebooks. Mint, basil, rosemary, thyme. We had a lot of lemongrass in the garden. I would steep it for tea. I would go through puberty and try to smoke it.
Maybe it’s the smells with memories that remain. I should’ve drunk more coffee as a baby.
Is there a method for coaxing cellular repair? I buy cut-price little boxes of salad cress from Asda and plunged my nose in them. I pick up an antique book about keeping illustrious shrubberies, and the seller advises me that the kinds of pesticides mentioned in the book should remain in the early twentieth century. My heart aches. I’m a very tiny garden.
mariaology 