My foul madeleine

It’s been said that smell is the sense that is the strongest when it comes to bringing back memories. A whiff of something can transport one to a different time or place with a swiftness and surety that taste or feel or sight cannot. The connection between smell and memory creates deep and abiding neural pathways.

I think about things that transport me via smell. Most are good, or at least, interesting. For one, whenever I’m in a nail salon and come across acetone I’m reminded of when I used to work summers in my family’s costume jewelry factory.

Or when I am lucky enough to have cinnamon waft across my face I conjure my bubbe who’d make the most incredible babka and rugelach. The joy of thinking of her baking commences.

I spritz my Chanel Coco parfum and I’m reminded of my first time in Paris. I’d bought real French perfume with no English on the bottle, as if it was somehow different from what I could get in the United States. It it was. It is.

But some things I smell and remember are not pleasant.

I know when my cat’s done something I wish she wouldn’t have. But she can’t help it.

When I am near stargazer lilies I have smell-memories of both my wedding and also decomposing matter, they twin love and rot.

But what I want to write about, here, is how semen smells to me. It’s not just something that wafts over me and is gone but it sticks to me and I can’t get the smell off— which then becomes not just a memory, but also a feeling. It is not a scent, it’s an odour. That’s frightening, menacing, violent.

The reason for this is because the first time I encountered semen was when the man who molested me wanted to come in my mouth. Besides not really knowing what that meant, I came to understand that I would never want his bodily fluids down my throat, into my gullet, inside me, being digested. I struggled and won, despite him wheedling and pushing my head towards his penis. I was so scared and the smell of him and his ejaculate on him, me, the bed clothes, have become seared into my memory.

The problem is that I do not, for the most part, now have the ability to separate what he tried to do to me and how I felt about it from other and subsequent sexual interactions. It follows that just about every time I’ve been with a man sexually there will be semen. The smell, the smell, of that semen that I choose to be near instantly brings me back to being a teenager trapped in a bedroom, trying to get away from a man who wanted to deposit a by-product of his body into one of my orifices. I squirm as I write this.

Imagine that one of the most wonderful and beautiful experiences a person can have is simultaneously entwined with one of the worst: willing pleasure and unwilling pain. They are inseparable. The senses are going: the touching, the feeling, the sounds of laughter and sighing, the tasting, looking at a lover and feeling electric, everything. And then a smell comes and washes over me, attaches itself to me. The present is gone.

When this happens I must leave my body, watch myself, and forcibly propel my self back to the present. I break free from another time, another reality, in order to live in the moment of what should be the now-of-love.

So, yes, smell is evocative. What he did stinks.