My Olfactory Nostalgia

//some words and also a poem on scented memories.

Few days ago I read this article — Emotional Memory: Why Scents Cause Nostalgia

سبحان الله

Amazing, how intimately memory is tied to our body. It's more than a mere file in our brain. It's even in the air. Decades live in our minds, and also in our skin, lungs, nerves… our senses.

“A poem on the subject”

You've experienced it too, right? These scented memories?

They do not arrive through deliberate thoughts rather a sudden scent PULLS YOU to the city of nostalgia. No, it doesn't politely knock at the door of memories rather it flings it open on your face! You? You have no choice except to drown in the flood of memories that you didn't know you still held.

I find it lovely, how in this world that moves quickly and forgets easily, a scent insists on making you remember. Not allowing you to ignore what once mattered. Not letting your love vanish completely. And sometimes, when the memory it brings is too heavy, scent becomes your form of mourning. It strengthens the architecture of loss…

Often, a scent is all we have left of someone, or something. In the absence of a loved one, we may find ourselves clinging to objects that carry their smell, clothing, linens, letters, books, flowers, and so on. These traces become repositories of forgotten people, emotions, moments, extension of memories we are not ready to part with. The desire to preserve such scents is the mind’s way of holding on to presence through the language of the body.

We may live, we may move on, we may forget. Then unexpectedly, the slightest touch of a familiar scent is enough to collapse years in a single breath. You not merely ‘recall’ a faded memory but you relive it, briefly, through a scent. You cannot schedule this sudden resurrection of the past. A scent comes to you, and when it does, it demands attention. The moment it enters your awareness, everything else is silenced. You are no longer where you are—you are somewhere else, someone else, for a moment outside of present. We become, if only for a second, who we once were.

A smell slips straight into the residence of memories. Memory is not just what we choose to remember, but also what chooses to return to us. This is why the scent of an old sweater might make one cry without knowing why. Grief, then, becomes something olfactory, something that lives even in the air.

And, I wonder,

What makes me nostalgic and grieve for something unknown, some life I never had? How was I able to associate some scents with someone or something I never really encountered?

Heavy is the smell of loss thickening the air around me and I go on despite. Waiting. Trusting The One In Whose Hands is my life.The desired spring of fulfilled dreams must be near… the flowers of ease must be waiting to bloom with their finest fragrance at the right time.

ان شاء الله

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