The smell of time

14/01/2022 Nilson Lattari

Time is a being wandering through space, without a mask (this is not a words game, of course) and it doesn’t care about people who live inside it. Time has a vibe that keeps everything and everybody connected beyond infinity throughout an invisible web.
This being is not present in philosophical languages to try to understand it. We note it in many ways. Through the signs that we have in our bodies and in our memories. They are the smells of time in our life. In short, if we pass in a place and we feel a specific smell, something inside us wakes up our memories and we go back to the past. The smell of popcorn, some special clothes, a perfume that a stranger is using beside us, a food being cooked. They alert us pointing out something about our previous life. It’s like how the past is coming from our memories.
Time is like a ghost wandering around us and warning us about its presence. It’s the present asking the past permission to go on the trip.
In fact, even time has its smell, taste, sound and touch. We need to use these ways to remember that time goes on, and the past left us many memories and marks. We miss them. The smell of garlic being cooked in a pan to prepare the rice, a person’s absence, the coffee taste, the wished biscuit of our childhood, the sound of the train passing beside us and the touch of someone’s hands on our body. They are electric currents passing throughout our memories and drawing images in our brains.
For me, the smell is the most delicious. I could say that it’s the voice coming from the past, whispered, slowly.
It’s enough to close our eyes and the time goes on throughout the celestial space of our memories and its voice occupies it with old smells and it takes us through the time. But its perfume arrives before because its smell is the rushed messenger. If someone’s voice keeps the same tone and suavity it becomes the smell of old life. When it is whispered by phone and it’s the same we can recover the image that belongs to someone who we don’t see for a long time. But if it belongs to an important person of our past the actual image is not necessary for us.
The smell and the sense of time are not responsible to bring us memories. Because our memories are responsible to rescue them for us. And the time involves everything and it’s a whole package. The smell of time belongs to our imaginary life. When we look at modern scenery, if we lived there a long time ago, it will be possible to see that it is still existing there. That’s our memories remaking up the new. These are the smell of time.
Smell and sense are the traps of the time for a trip to the past because, in fact, it can’t be made.
The smells of time are the balsam, they are our materialized memories.