Scent Sometimes I can smell the Philippines. It happens randomly. I could be walking into a store and suddenly the air brings me south of the equator. Or I’ll be on the street and one vent will seem to be a portal to home. It might happen when I’m at school, and for a moment the classroom is Manila. The scent smells like mildew and humidity. It’s a perfume of pollution and smog; heavy and almost tangible; tropical and urban all at the same time. It is all the ugliest smells of the world. It smells like corruption and nuclear testing; like poor government funding for proper waste removal. It’s poverty and the squatter houses near my family’s old neighborhood. Rivers filled with shit and babies bathing and peeing in the same pool of dirty water. But still, when those unexpected moments happen and I walk into a room and it’s got that scent, I remember the ugly but only after I am hit with that immediate first reaction: home.
My family. Avelina, Tita Chit, Tito Manny before he came here The sari sari store down the corner where I used to buy candy as a kid Riding bikes down the street and skinning my knee Eating rice and fish with my hands, off of a giant banana leaf Mango carts and carved piña Being around people I love and speaking three languages in the same sentence The only times I’ve ever been with by family in numbers more than three The Philippines is so many things, but one thing it will always be is warm.
It’s happened with people I’ve loved. Inhales carry the surprise of a boy’s cologne. I’ll be someplace and out of nowhere he’s there: that scent, the ambiguous perfume that I could never pin point as natural or manufactured. Suddenly I’m in class and it’s sophomore year of college. I am nineteen and when we’re close, I freeze. I become petrified, like a fossil, or someone put under a spell. I can’t move, but everything inside me is moving. I’ve never been a detail-oriented person and yet suddenly I notice everything: how he places his hands and feet, how he scrolls down the screen of his laptop when he’s bored. Rolls his eyes when peers say dumb things. Scratches his head. Licks his lips. How he smells. Sometimes a scent will bring me later in time, after everything, when I wake up and it’s been over for a while. Sunshine flooding my room. Sheets that feel soft against my skin, but nothing like the relief of a human body next to mine. We hadn’t spoken in weeks, but I find one of 92