When I was in college, a lover came to visit me in London. He’d been traveling through the Balkans and staying in hostels where he’d needed to furnish his own towel and toiletries. When he arrived at my cubelike…
This spring, during my last semester of my MFA, I was in a nonfiction workshop where we were tasked with keeping a weekly observation journal. The entries could be about anything, and didn’t need to be formal—just notes on whatever we’d noticed that week. During a time when I was working full tilt on my thesis, and doing more revising than writing, the observation log was a way to keep me connected to the daily practice of writing.
I found that my observations tended to be a record of my microfixations throughout the semester. The fourth paragraph of “The Catalog of Human Memories” is the one I wrote first, and it appeared, basically as it stands now, in my observation log.
At this same time, I was already thinking a lot about perfume and the power of sense memory. During the winter, I’d become obsessed with the idea of finding a signature scent. Possibly because I was feeling acutely shambolic, and a signature scent seemed like something that someone who had her life together might have. I ordered a dozen miniscule perfume samples, and they arrived in tiny glass vials. For one week at a time I’d apply one sample religiously, and pretend I might be any kind of different person. It was a lot like trying on someone else’s clothes. As I tried to hone my own taste, and understand what it was in each perfume I gravitated toward or shied away from, I became enthralled with reading other perfume reviews on Fragrantica. Then I started to wonder why certain scents speak to us over others, and I fell into a Google hole of perfume history.
In some ways, this essay became its own kind of observation log detailing the spiral of this momentary obsession with scent, and the memories and emotions it produced. Often as I’m in the midst of such obsessions, I wonder why I’m spending so much time researching something so far disconnected from the project I’m supposed to be working on (at the time my thesis, but normally, whatever work I’ve promised myself I’m going to revise). I’m often drawn to flash nonfiction, because it can serve as a cathartic outlet for the subjects I can’t stop thinking about. I’ve found that if I follow a thread long enough it tends to reward me in the end.
CELIA CUMMISKEY is a recent graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University’s MFA program. Her work has appeared in Post Road, phoebe, and The Missouri Review. Her essays have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Los Angeles, California. Find her on Instagram at @Ccelia.rose.
