My junior year smelled like lavender and warm cinnamon apples. Wind tip-toed in through my opened window as I touched base every few hours and got to sit under the purple, blue, pink canopies of my room and work on homework. Stray organic compounds wandered on my desk next to rows of integrals and towers of papers I still need to read.
Everyday I would leave and come back, leave and come back, leave and come back—weeks of maybe too many meetings, maybe too much running around—and still my room would give off its distinct sticky, sweet scent.
In a year of pushing the finish line further and further back, in a year of picking at the sampler platter of things I could do and the person I could be, running around came naturally, instinctively even. And in that running around, I sometimes forgot what home smelled like, completely nose-blind to it when I would come back and was focused just on getting to my bed, calling it a night, and mentally preparing myself to do it all again in the morning.
But still the smell persisted; and it took me a while to realize that this was the scent of home—that the warm fragrance would always be there to welcome me back no matter how tired I would be (and I would definitely be tired a lot). In It lingered on my skin and in my backpack. It was exhaled in the conversations that reminded me of rest and laced in the smell of meals grabbed sitting across one of the many friends I haven’t seen all quarter. It whispered down the hallway and stepped into the never-ending conversations of Lower East. It was in beach trips and ski trips and late-night homework grinds.
In chemistry, one of the things you learn is that our ability to smell is a result of the aromatic rings of different substances that bond to our olfactory system. Or in other words, good smells differ from bad smells only by a carbon or two—and maybe not even then; sometimes they can be made of exactly the same things, but this one has a five-membered carbon ring, while this one has a six or even a seven. It could be that one is chiral and one isn’t; or they’re chiral in different areas.
This year, the structure of my aromatic rings took on the form of 100 new living-mates and 19 new dance partners, and the pastiche of memories of everything in between. Those carbon compounds danced with me, laughed with me, and made the sour smell of loneliness so unnoticeable. The warm, cinnamon smell was made of new friendships, and the lavender, a brazen determination to challenge the “what if”. Trying, failing, striving; the moments of tears, relief, peace, exhaustion, disappointment, surprise, hope—it all mingled together in the crazy olfactory system of my third year of college.