There are Powerlines in our Bloodlines

Yesterday, I went back to the park early in the morning. The sun was just coming in, and my arms started to glisten a bit around the second lap. The barrier surrounding the track is blanketed in honeysuckle vine in full bloom. It is one of the smells that most reminds me of my childhood. The scent was so syrupy sweet that I felt at first like it was pleasant, but then I began to choke on the heaviness of it all.

It takes me back in two ways: First, to the home I lived in for the first seven years of my life. It was in the middle of our small town, and I loved our backyard, which was also lined in masses of honeysuckle. The smell also conjures my time in middle Tennessee when I first started college. I was so unhappy, and I remember spending my first summer alone there writing poetry and creating a zine that now reminds me of that dark time each time I open the pages. There is this one poem in particular that recalls honeysuckle smells, and I copied and pasted it several times over to comprise the backdrop of the cover for the zine. It's like the Dickinson poem "I Felt a Funeral in my Brain," as the poem just keeps on repeating and repeating and repeating.

The meaning for the saying, "Youth is wasted on the young," once escaped me. I don't feel that way anymore. I hold on to all of my memories, good and bad, and I realize that it is these various scents that sometimes create a more powerful flashback than the soundtracks that accompanied them: The Bunny's breath after cinnamon toothpaste when he kissed me goodbye yesterday reminded me of my Mom's breath when she would kiss me in the dark before leaving for her 4:00 am shift at Wal-Mart in the 80s. I'm certain the Care Bears radio I powered on religiously as a child was playing Don Henley or Aaron Neville or some other shitty easy listening music as she walked like a shadow figure down the hallway and out to her warming Pontiac Grand Am, which was both the first brand new car my parents ever owned, and the first car in which she split her head open in a collision shortly after its purchase.

Before bed last night, I sloughed A&D ointment on my cut from where I broke my favorite red mixing bowl yesterday--the same bowl with my father's masking tape and sharpie love note on the bottom--and splinters of vintage Pyrex shot into my hand. It was difficult to discern the hairline cuts of blood from the tiny shards of red ceramic in my skin. The smell of the ointment took me back to the time I got my first and only tattoo. I had just turned eighteen, and when my father found out, he refused to speak to me for a week. I would lie in bed with my new wound slathered in thick, hygienic-scented ointment and cry because I'd never been shunned like that before. That was nine years ago, but my silly little medical cream just took me back to that week before I knew everything would get even worse, and before I would become the sad girl that wrote crazy poems about honeysuckle vines...