During the summer of 2020, COVID-19 kept me mostly to my house, and I took it upon myself to read the Harry Potter series. I had seen the movies with my brother, but never read them, so I thought it was time.Â
I inched at them little by little every night until I finished the whole series. At this time, I had a particular lotion I put on every night from Tree Hut. I stopped using it once the bottle was empty, until one day I purchased it again. I put it on and instantly got transported to when I was reading the series. It was as if I had time-traveled back in time and was reunited with all the emotions I had while reading the series. My sense of smell acted as a transport into the past.
This isn’t the only time I’ve experienced this sensation. When I first went away to college, my mom gave me two small travel-size bottles of perfume; one was hers and one was my grandma’s, who’d passed away the year prior. Throughout the year, whenever I smelled each vial, I was reminded of my mom and grandma, and felt as if they were with me. Now, in my junior year of college, I still reach for the perfumes when I miss my family a little extra.Â
Another time I felt this was with another perfume, but instead, the one I wore when I attended a dance class at Broadway Dance Center in New York. I was 17, and my mom and I were touring the colleges I applied to.Â
I’ve danced since I was four years old and always dreamed of being a dancer in the big city. One of my dance teachers had moved to New York the year before, so I met her to take this class. The whole time, I had chills and felt proud of myself for putting myself out there. A couple of months later, I found the perfume when I was cleaning, and was instantly brought back to that studio and my courage in that moment. My sense of smell, once again, made me travel through time.
Pictures and videos take us back in time, but not in the same way as scent does. Often with images, it’s hard to disassociate your memory from the picture, and the picture or video consumes the memory you had. The smell enhances your memory and brings back thoughts and feelings you didn’t realize you had.
Certain smells will stick with me for the rest of my life. The smell of cigarettes will always remind me of my Papa Corky; the scent of sunscreen will always make me think of summertime and my dad putting it on my face when I was little; the smell of plastic will always take me back to the Polly Pockets I played with as a kid. Our sense of smell is the one thing that can transport us. It’s the closest thing (at least in this lifetime) we’ll ever get to time travel.