Lilacs.

At first I was going to blog about tattoos, and then I was going to blog about self-appreciation, but I settled on something far less important - scents. Literally, how things smell.

But before I begin, I just want to say that my hands are already numb from writing multiple college and scholarship essays today. Actually, I've written more in the past two hours than I have in quite a while. And there's so much more writing to go. For my second top choice in schools there's about three sections of writing due and I swear my brain is going to explode.

Right now I blog as shades of white, blue, and orange color the pixels on my desktop screen, the webcam faced away from everything because I'm terrified of Internet intruders, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone waiting dog-eared on the soft fleece blanket behind me. From the hallway my eight year old calico purrs like a lawnmower, settling into her favorite spot beneath the avalanche of laundry. Alright, so it's not that big yet, but avalanche seemed like a pretty intense word. I would say it's almost eighty degrees in my room - it's usually a sauna, but it's past the certain time of year where no matter how hot it gets my fleece blanket is always a necessity. So.. why does it feel like Christmas?

A strong scent of peppermint is drifting up the stairwell from the living room. I usually have some idea of what my mother is doing down there by the smells that rise upstairs, but I honestly have no idea what she's up to. It reminds me of the holidays when we just relax and suck on those swirly red-and-white mints and listen to Christmas music from when she was growing up. The plastic box is out right now full of Halloween decorations, but it might as well be full of candy canes and Santa hats instead of bats and grotesque masks.

These illusions are so interesting to me, when a certain smell possesses an almost magnetic force and pulls you right back to where you first breathed it in. Every time you inhale, the memories, no matter how dull they are, become fresh again, surface into the sticky pool of thought that is your brain. There has to be a reason why ever y time I smell a certain cologne I think of an ex, or every time I smell the summer rain I'm reflecting back on the time Alex and I danced in the downpour while our brownies in the oven got soggy.

A few minutes ago I was in my brother's room attempting to scout a new (old) coat since the temperature outside is dropping [and my arms get cold in October air]. I routed through bags and bags of plastic before I realized I was digging through summer things, not winter. Quick to catch on, I know. One bag was full of nothing but bathing suits, and leaning down close the beach from summers past still lingered in the strings that tied it together. Who knows how many years those swimsuits have been in there? It could have been only a few months and it could have been five years, but the scent was overpowering: sand could have been stuffed in that bag for all I knew.

My train of thoughts has been interrupted quite a lot since I started this blog, so I'm going to just start wrapping up before it becomes horrible. I want to remember a time before I had the friends I do now more vividly. I want there to be a smell that pulls me back to not just a certain time of year, not only a certain weather, but a carefree time. And carefree should smell like lilacs. Only more exotic. I've just decided.