on smells and writing

My youtube searches are triggered by dreams of grandeur that seek inspiration in video creations by illogical people. And then 45 minutes later my thoughts on a moment have passed. They (the majority of older people who suppose their life experience to have brought them a reasonable share of wisdom, which I do not contest) always say that one only needs to start in order to complete. This is logical.

So after searching my boyfriend’s computer for pictures of his ex-girlfriends, I have a conundrum: how do I return to the smells? If I had written in the moment, perhaps I would have adequately described how the city smells like an agreeable mix of coffee and tuna: tuna as a mid-morning snack sandwich neither sweet enough for breakfast nor substantial enough to be considered lunch, and coffee as a repeated and uncountable whim. Coffee – slowly being replaced by the international influence of tea. A man yawns on the subway with bad breath and I get up, the whole time shooting him a mean, dirty look. On the way out, the smell is interrupted by the cologne that Brian Eidelman wore in high school. Finding people who look like Ryan, Monika, and my boxy and masculine (yet beautiful) neighbor growing up makes me forget that I am a mutant here. “¡Oof, que blanca!” says the gypsy man as I pass on my bike. And then, that guy on the Rambla who challenged me to keep looking at him by looking straight at me. I’m sure everyone looks away. I can’t. I started it and am eventually gazing. Vitiligo with horrible burn scars... My pscoriasis lesions begin to itch and I apart my eyes. I look back and he’s looking down. He passes me, and smells like nothing.