Oh hello Now, each morning when I open the backdoor to let the cat out, I smell again the same smell that I used to smell growing up here in this city, a smell that is totally familiar like an ex’s perfume yet seems so vague in its referent (the smell of a city) that I wonder if it is a trick, the kind of trick I will only figure out years later when someone tells me that the smell I am remembering is just the smell of oak or the smell of uncollected rubbish or the smell of me. I walk around parks and sit in them. I look at brick buildings, small crowded balconies, poppies and roses everywhere arcing onto the streets in varying states of death. In Svetlana Boym’s
Passages and Jubilee
Passages and Jubilee
Passages and Jubilee
Oh hello Now, each morning when I open the backdoor to let the cat out, I smell again the same smell that I used to smell growing up here in this city, a smell that is totally familiar like an ex’s perfume yet seems so vague in its referent (the smell of a city) that I wonder if it is a trick, the kind of trick I will only figure out years later when someone tells me that the smell I am remembering is just the smell of oak or the smell of uncollected rubbish or the smell of me. I walk around parks and sit in them. I look at brick buildings, small crowded balconies, poppies and roses everywhere arcing onto the streets in varying states of death. In Svetlana Boym’s