Soap Does Not Mistake Itself For Perfume.
The reclaiming of memories
I bought my old soap again. I haven’t had it since I was 21 or 20 even. I don’t know why, perhaps because it was a hassle to order online and I got lazy. Or else because, when things go bad in the way they do at those ages, the first thing sacrificed was the little luxuries because I was unaware of how important they were. The package arrived 15 minutes before I had to get ready for work. I’d been cleaning the apartment and went down with two trash bags and found it in the lobby. A big white box with the logo on the side. In the elevator, I turned the box over in my hand with a strange sense of history. I knew the product. I could feel the sensation of the packaging within, see the color, but I couldn’t quite remember how it smelled. Only that I liked it which is a great success in and of itself because I am particular about scents as they often turn my stomach.
Entering the apartment, hot for lack of AC, I turned immediately down the hall to the bathroom. It would have been just as easy to wait until my shower that night to use this soap again. I was not waiting around or checking the tracking information each morning. I had no clue when it would arrive only that it would eventually and I hoped on walks home from work I’d remember to look for it. But something about the sense of time lost between the last I had such a luxury was weighing on me. Not in an excited, happy to splurge way, but a nervous reminder of what we lose even as we remember. How what was once a monthly purchase had for some reason stopped arriving. Even the scent was lost having once been my favorite.
Standing at the sink before the mirror I pumped the soap into my hand. It isn’t really a soap at all but an oil, yellow like honey but more translucent. I was afraid I’d run out before I got the chance to enjoy it and I let the one pump suffice. Rubbing the oil along my arms which I had made damp with a rag, the scent wafted up from its place below my shoulders.
There was, immediately, an eerie song sung within me. A recognition and pull to a place I had once belonged that I had no desire to go back to. Like my memory and the soap itself saw something familiar in each other and were reaching out to touch. There’s something about a scent that can send you back somewhere unlike any other sense. To me, moments in history are more carefully averaged by a smell. The way you might mix the colors of a memory and though they blur together you get the entire picture of what it belonged to. Or how a song that always played in high school will bring you the perfect center of all the emotions that occurred on every good or bad day you’d happened to hear it through the static of a radio. It isn’t about feeling precisely as you once did, in fact it isn’t a real memory at all, but it reminds you most often what was there. Like the smell of my mother's cleaning supplies almost always evokes the image of a sunny day in fall with the windows open. I’m sure there were rainy winter days she cleaned our house but when laid out before me the clear outlier is that in autumn I was more often to discover the house that way.
The oil lathered, turning to a milky white, and moving down my arms like it was suddenly thinner than water. The smell was nothing I could describe, not flowers, but cleanliness in general. As it lingered in the space between me and the mirror I felt that return. Like a deja vu because you recognize all the pieces and where they might go. I knew that this feeling I had, this weight in my stomach, accompanied longing in the purest kind.
I used to wear this soap for someone.
Opposed to perfumes, I’d rinse off, sometimes not even wetting my hair. Using this soap and hoping the smell might remain somewhere on them, for the sake of having something linger in a relationship that was vanishing quicker than I could recall it. It was hot that fall, fall of 2017, and I stood in the shower just to find relief. Rinsing the grime of the city off, yes, but most often it was to believe that I could be remembered. Sometimes I’d anticipate those visits. I’d smell the air outside and there was something in it made from loneliness and desire that told me I’d be seeing them. The sky would be blue long after it had gone dark and the wind would blow a certain kind of sideways. I’d go home and I’d clean. Clean my room and me, tidy and try to be good of all kinds in the hope that it would add up to the end of my longing. I had never had a terrible relationship with femininity but this soap was, to me, the most womanly thing there was. I had to put my femininity on first and wash it away. Then a piece of me always hoped that like cologne or laundry detergent, when we separated this part of me was there. Knowing that scents evoked such a memory, I hoped for others it was the same. Hoped that when that smell averaged out all they could find was love. At least then it felt like I existed. I was always a little skeptical of this truth. Like the noise of a tree falling with no one around to hear it, or the way a woman doesn’t exist unless someone’s looking at her. Even so, I wanted him to take me somewhere and if all that would fit in his life was the smell of my soap left over from a hug then maybe I could survive on that for a while.
I felt a strange disappearance in the bathroom. It was a memory disconnected from me. Hallowed, falling flat, because I didn’t quite feel that way anymore or subscribe to those beliefs. It was like arriving there without really being there. Visiting without your feet touching the ground and leaving tracks. The memory didn’t strike a chord or make me sad it was as simple a sensation as a room-temperature June wind. It wouldn’t cool you off, but it wasn’t really warm either. The soapy water trickled down my arms and fell away fast down the drain. So too with it the memory. I could feel it dying out. Then it was gone. Staring at my older self in the mirror I could look back and pluck that feeling from its place in my history but as I took a deep breath in I was no closer to the past than I was before the package arrived.
Perhaps déjà vu is not a reliving at all but a reclaiming. That a moment which once belonged to everyone else, is now entirely your own. The dream-like way these memories unfold as you are living them. The haze clears and what came to you in sleep disappears to reveal a real and tangible moment in your history. The details lost to groggy memory and half-consciousness have been given back to you for safekeeping. Or even something simpler.
I left the bathroom and walked to my room pulling out drawers of clothes. My arm moved the air around and the smell brushed my nose. I got dressed and the smell began to fall away to detergent and life itself. Soap is not so withstanding, made to be used over and over. It’s meant to fall from you quickly, not stick. Soap does not mistake itself for perfume. Standing in the mirror my shirt unbuttoned I pulled the collar and stuck my nose beneath it with one last gesture before leaving. Not flowers really, but something clean. Pulling away to stare in the mirror for another moment which for once now entirely belonged to me.
Recently I have been in a bit of a slump. Beyond having the blues. A six-month stagnation in the things I like to do. I’ve abandoned books and given up on chapters that need to be written. I sit on the subway where I read because my apartment is too loud and I have no self-discipline, and I can’t focus enough to get past the first page of books I genuinely love and like. And when I do read I feel the thrill and think I want to keep going I must remember how it feels right now to read so when I go home I will be motivated to continue. And then inevitably I listen to my music and I close my eyes and can’t bring myself to do what I said I’d be doing. Even audiobooks felt tedious.
My therapist told me to read the book bird by bird and she lent me a copy which meant I really had to read it and not just say I would. She has recommended me one book in all our time together so I knew she was serious about it. last week I picked it up again because my therapist is moving and I need to give her the book back and Lamott included a quote I liked by E.L. Doctorow.
“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
The next morning I woke up early because I had to. I sat on the couch of my quiet apartment and decided I would read one chapter. Which was an easy task it was two pages long. Then another chapter went and before I knew it an hour had passed and I had killed 40 pages of Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck only to be inspired to write just one paragraph in my book which later became three paragraphs. What does this say about life? I don’t really know. But I think it’s worth noting that everything is terribly long, even two-page chapters, but all you have to do is go one at a time and you will get through most things that way. I think it’s worth noting too that you do not need to read 52 or 100 books a year. In fact, I’m starting to think that makes all books less enjoyable to me. (You can do as you please). There was that tweet circulating that said to slow down and read fewer books. I’m not sure people say that often enough.
“How many places have we lived?” I asked Lori.
“That depends on what you mean by lived,” she said. “If you spend one night in some town, did you live there? What about two nights? Or a whole week?” (Page 29)
I’ve lived in my apartment for four years and the apartment building for five. In fact, it has been so long that my management company, which is mostly absent, got around to putting my last name on the directory in the lobby. Before that, I lived in a crummy three-bedroom in lower east side which I shared with four other girls and five mice (of the ones we managed to catch). Then before that, I lived in a dorm in midtown with three girls which was probably the most depressing of them all because it was in midtown and we had no stove so all we could make was microwave meals because our cafeteria was 14 blocks away.
My history is not full of one-year leases and apartment approvals in the way that it is with some of my friends who hop from neighborhood to neighborhood. My relationship with this apartment is the longest I’ve ever had you could probably find my fingerprints carved into the cheap paint they used, eroded by my existence here. Every day I wake up and the air has feeling memories to it from times which seem too long ago. This conversation though, of what it means to live somewhere, struck me in a way that it never has. What does it mean to live somewhere?
I remember when we moved into our house from an apartment five minutes down the road I asked my mother if the apartment was going to miss us. In fact, I was terrified it would. I lived in a town bordered by a nuclear power plant and twenty minutes from Pfizer. There were hoards of kids arriving and leaving again at the nature of their parent’s jobs. I didn’t understand how you could do that to kids it seemed to me like a betrayal. I was always afraid I’d come home one day and find my parents were selling our house and we had to go somewhere new. ‘m biased of course. My entire extended family besides one single aunt resided in my town. My parents grew up there. It was a web of memory.
My friend who is also from Connecticut was telling her mother where we grew up. To which her mother said we lived in “the book barn town.” The book barn is a used book store with goats and slides and cats all over the place. My friend told us the cool girls in her school used to go there to take pictures. It was a big thing. I told her that almost no one went there that I knew and if they did it was not of any social consequence. Later too I remember talking in a sociology course about my hometown and how we had these pills in the event the powerplant went into meltdown. I couldn’t think of the name or what the pills did. My professor, in an attempt to help me remember, asked if I meant cyanide pills. I was appalled.
“no, they’re for radiation sickness.”
It’s strange. What does it mean to live in a place? The way we discover often we don’t know it at all because we know it so well. The hidden gems lost because we perceive them. Once we leave a place is that when we start living there? Those serendipitous and random moments you find someone who knows where you’re from. I don’t know. I am not made out for the nomadic lifestyle. I have an entirely different concept of living, but I suppose this is the first time I’ve ever really thought to wonder of such definitions.
That is everything for this month. Please share, it would mean a lot to me. No pressure of course I love you all just the same.
I’ll see ya around if not here, then somewhere groovy.
That’s all this month! If you enjoyed the little conversation we had let me know! Save, share, and tag @chloeinletters
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Here’s to Starbucks Fridays, Sweet Thursdays, and luxury soap
Love always,
Chloé
I've said this on a previous comment, but the way you write blows me away. describing the scent and feelings had me almost smelling said soap/oil, truly beautiful. thank you again for allowing us to read these.