How to turn into a ghost without dying: lose your sense of smell.

Anosmia is uncanny. It was only for ten days, but it set me adrift. It’s not just about perfume — though anointing myself with 1950s Cuir de Russie and smelling nothing at all is just rude. That sense of your own edges or someone else’s presence is gone. I was sealed off from the world’s flow of information, wrapped in plastic, disconnected. Like walking through a dream where you can’t touch anything.

Skipping past the paranoia about the cat litter tray, about food freshness, about breath…even as a perfume nerd, I think I underestimated both how far we rely on olfactory clues and the layers of pleasure that smell brings.

Tea was hot brown water; excessively-steeped lapsang was hot brown water that rasped my throat. Chocolate was sweet paste. Food, unless loaded with intense sourness or umami, was just bland texture. (I crunched through bags of marmitey Twiglets.) I made a chicken stew loaded with black olive tapenade, miso-rich stock, mushrooms, and enough garlic to make Dracula cry. Snarlish tells me it was delicious. It was… merely savoury.

But I still wore perfume. Does Mitsouko smell beautiful if no one smells it?

That moment you spray something familiar, the brain scrambles to fill in the gaps. Contrary to received wisdom, we can remember smells (not just the label we give a smell, or the cascade of associated memories). That insubstantial scent experience might be as convincing as a seven-year-old la-la-la-ing their way through an aria, but the confabulation is fascinating. (I’m curious about the variations of the degree of remembering and reconstructing –just as some people can hear music with full orchestration in their memory. Trained noses? your thoughts?)

Smells came back like fragile ice slivers of sensation that melted when I tried to take hold of them.  The first flash of brightness as I peeled an orange made me cry. A burst of soaked earth as I open the window. The alert of burning toast. The full embrace of Onda as I emerged from a blanket-swaddled nap that pulled me back into my own body. Home.

Originally posted 7 January 2019