It was a beautiful New York day. Walking through the park I reminded myself that I didn’t miss home so much. New York trees are the same as nowhere trees, and water still flowed downhill. New York had more to it than home did anyway. There was a man and a woman, passionately kissing on the rim of the fountain. There was a young man playing piano for money, making eye contact with everyone who walked by. He was able to shame the majority into throwing a dollar or two into his bucket. Even beauty cost money in this town. There was a girl in a floral printed sundress, sitting cross-legged on a bench rolling a joint. There was woman in a pantsuit talking on her cell phone in a foreign language, dodging around those who walked slower than she. And just as I was nearing the edge of the park, just as my residence was coming into site, I caught wind of it.
The smell brought me back so fast I felt as though I had been punched in the gut. It was a smell without a name, but I knew it well. It was the smell a cigarette leaves as the smoker walks away. It was the smell of freshly mowed grass. It was the smell of a t-shirt that had been worn in bars where fruity drinks and beer had been spilt on it, where smoke had permeated it, where the smells of others had been entwined with its own individual threads through personal encounters, the kind shared by newly reunited friends. It was all these smells, carried on the wind to the exit of a park between Sixth Ave and Sullivan. With my residence in site I almost started crying. I was so close to home in that moment, that going elsewhere to eat and lay and laugh seemed traitorous. It was fleeting.
I had no choice but to walk upstairs, crawl under my sheets and inhale deeply the smell of conditioned air and store brand detergent in a futile attempt to rewire the synapses in my brain and scold my olfactory senses. Next time I did not want to be caught so off guard. Next time I did not want to feel so lonely.
