How Does It Feel?

How does it feel?

What does anger smell like?

• All I can smell is the air I need to fuel me. It smells like nothing. Hot, cold, spring, summer, or fall – whatever the season it has to come from outside. I can’t stay closed in. It smells like whatever special blend the season needs it to have, and it smells like anything so long as I can breathe it in quickly, so long as it fills my lungs, so long as I can run. As long as I can turn it inside out to give voice to the sounds clawing out from within me; it can smell like anything at all. But mostly it smells like nothing. 

• Anger smells like fumes of a fracking pad at the top of a bare mountain where there used to be a forested peak and now there is only dirt, progress, and clean burning American fuel far as the eye can see. Or the hot stink of algae growing from the human shit that’s gathered on the shores of a great lake, mixed with a rotting fish, one eye starting to collapse as it stares up, lifelessly pondering the sun. Anger smells like the money with white slave owner’s and genocidaires' well-thumbed faces looking up in approval as it passes hands to buy fruit that smells unripe but wears the right color. The fruit earned its color, not from the sun but from a dark truck ride filled with chemicals to help it sell at the market. I wonder how those chemicals smell, or the trucks, or the people who pay desperate young men and pregnant women for dangerous work and vote for fascists who promise to legally line their pockets. I wonder how those votes smelled, I wonder if I would know to be angry if I smelled them. Anger is the smell that the international wire transfer fee makes as it disappears into some faceless white man’s bank account, while the tired, proud human working illegally, getting paid under the table, sends almost everything he has to his family beyond the American border and pays a price so steep it makes me want to choke. 

• Maybe I want to think anger smells like nothing, because it’s too much to admit that everything can smell like anger to me now. 

• Anger smells like the fumes I’ve been choking on for the past hour as we sit in traffic on our private bus in Antananarivo. The traffic is always like this and I crave the moments when we are able to climb above 5 or even 10 miles an hour. Even then I can smell it every time a car passes me. Each breath feels more shallow at this point. I cover my mouth with my t-shirt. I mostly breathe through my mouth on these bus rides, the girl next to me mentions that she blows black out of her nose every night. I haven’t had that problem, but I can feel it in my lungs. Everyone else on this bus is younger than me. I was coughing up shit from the fumes I chose to breathe in at their age. I sink in my seat, I’m pretty sure there is lead in the gas here but the country won’t publicize it. Madagascar has one of the worst economies in the world but they desperately want to modernize and progress and part of that has to do with the image they can create on the international stage. Leaded gasoline is cheap and efficient but it’s not a good look and it is terrifyingly bad for people and irreparably poisons the environment (we used it in America all the way up until 1996 but it has always been a known toxin from day one). I look out the window and see countless children and mothers and fathers and sons. Half of Madagascar’s population is under 25. They will spend their entire lives breathing in the fumes of progress. While America and France were going through their industrial revolution Madagascar and every other country like it were making it possible. The French regularly and publicly slaughtered groups of people and buried them in mass graves. I wonder what that smelled like. It helped to establish their control over the population. The Malagasy people did not want to work for free but all their father’s rice paddies eventually became fields for the rest of the world’s sugar cane, or vanilla… their primary forests once covered almost the entire Island which is roughly the size of Texas. Less than 20 percent of that forest remains. I don’t know what those trees were used for or what it smelled like as they were cut down one after the other, but when you fly over the country you can see what looks like deserts stretching from horizon to horizon. I told the girl next to me how strange it looked, and that I didn’t know there were such large deserts here. She told me how sometimes land that is deforested just never goes back to being fertile again. I… had never realized that. I took a deep breath through my nose then and it smelled like the stale recycled air of every plane I’d ever been on. Did you know that there used to be lemurs the size of gorillas? They ate leaves from trees that grew on this planet within the last few hundred years. Jesus was walking around while giant lemurs slept in the canopies of a network of trees that spanned the entire Island of Madagascar. I wonder what flavors went extinct along with the countless species of plants that have been burned by the West’s conquest around the Earth, I wonder what the last of each of them smelled like.  

• What does love taste like? 

  • Love tastes like chicken casserole, like the thing that time and heat does to a list of ingredients that makes them so much more than they ever were when they were apart. Love tastes like that first bite of a meal you’ve been eating since you were a kid, steam rising up above your eyes as the heat and flavor sends a wave of warmth through your body and your shoulders drop and you look around the at the table full of familiar faces and the light gets warmer and everyone laughs as the conversations pick up and the silverware makes cheery clincks and clanks against plates and dishes. Love tastes like seconds that come without question and meals shared among your closest family. 

  • Love tastes like steaming, warming, copious amounts of rice. 

• What does grief feel like?

  • I never knew I had a feeling of fullness in my chest until the moment it was gone. Like that feeling when you run too hard or fall unexpectedly and you can’t catch your breath. But those moments pass and you get the feeling of relief as things fill back up to normal and settle in the right place, but now the empty feeling won’t go away. When it first hits you might start to cry, the unfamiliar emptiness makes you feel helpless, and the tears will try to fix it, but they don’t. Somehow, you start to just grow around it, this cavity in your chest where the heart used to be. You try and come up with a way to explain why you have to feel this way, why you deserve it. But every night you still hope that that  fullness you never knew to cherish would just come back. You hope you eventually forget how this feels. And eventually, hopefully, you do. 

  • Grief feels like the too strong grasp of a toddler who won’t let go of your shirt as his mother tries to get him to end his many minute hug goodbye. Your bus is there to take you away and this time you aren’t coming back. He is old enough to understand that he won’t see you again and you are young enough to act like it is possible you might see all these faces again. You took pictures with them didn’t you? You could come back for a research project, can’t you? Grief feels like the secret question that’s not too deep inside. Should I try and bring him with me? Would I give him a better life in America than he could ever have here? You know you can’t and that it’s crazy. His mother is right there. He has siblings and a family and he is happy all of the time. He doesn’t need a home with you, he is home. You look down and see the purest diamond tears dropping out of his eyes. You look at his mom and something passes between you and her. It has something to do with the strength in her shoulders now gone a bit slack, and how her one hip that is always ready to hoist the weight of her youngest baby is now more on center; but it’s mostly in the eyes. Greif is the feeling of knowing that you are both wondering the exact same thing. We goad him into letting go. He holds on to her, I hold on to nothing and then I get on my bus. 

• What does joy look like?

  • Joy looks like the morning light hitting the water droplets condensed and gathered on the transparent plastic lid that articulates into the black rectangular shell of your seed tray. Joy looks like the moment you gently lift the plastic piece up and rivulets of water race down to gather and pool and moisten the soil on the far side where you are lifting up to get a peek to see if any of the seeds you so tenderly planted in their pods have woken up to meet the world. Joy is the bright green color of seedlings spread throughout in rows and lines as they poke their way through the earth whose warm, wet, smell wafts its way up to you in your room promising heat, and life, and whispering somehow about ancient things that are fresh and alive for the very first time. 

  • Joy looks like a band of cousins and brothers gathered around on a rooftop looking out over the city, one wielding a guitar, another perched in front of a keyboard, all possessed of a glass or rum or a bottle of beer with another waiting in the wings should that glass get too empty – no one without a grin or a smirk. Joy looks like the open arms of strangers who are letting you become family as they assume you’ll know how to sing along with every Stevie Wonder song they all have memorized by heart. Joy is the looks on their faces when you manage to stop being so fucking shy and really try and sing along with them and they go wild for it. Joy looks like smiles that shine through as they sing a song in Malagasy and the look of approval your new brother gives you as he hears you try and sing along as you read the words off of the spider web cracked cell phone screen one of his cousins holds for their drunken uncle who is leading the tune. Joy looks like the stars you see so clearly at the end of the night as a crisp post-midnight air tells your senses you are ready for bed, and the look of surprise you get from your brother when you ask him how to say ‘stars’ in Malagasy. He tells you the word is ‘Kintana’ and now that is how joy looks and sounds and feels and smells to you. It is also the way Zarnot and Saroby doubled over laughing when you blurted out the words for lucky, fishing pole, and stars as soon as you realized that they all rhymed. Joy looks like a walk through nature with a woman so wise and patient that she would tell you the name of every plant you wanted to know over and over again no matter how many times you asked. Joy looks like the first time you see a full moon in the southern Hemisphere and realize you never thought you would get to look at the moon and feel like you were seeing it again for the first time. Joy looks like the smiles that your brother would wear everyday even when the bike to get your dad to work took over an hour to start, even when it was unseasonably cold, even when the fucking stupid as shit American (you) living with them did some cultural faux pas or another, even when that same American asked for the most expensive fruit possible but then made up for it by offering up a few bucks to buy it and some other stuff at the market as well. Joy looks like the face of someone you wind up loving and being accepted by against all odds in a wide and confusing world.

What is… ?

• The taste of whatever food you can scrape together after everyone else has made their plate at the buffet 

• The way the ‘send’ button looks as your finger hovers over it and you’ve been staring at it now for over a minute so your vision starts to narrow in

• The feeling of the inside of your pockets 

•  The smell of a walk on a loamy forest path that no one else knows 

• The way you hear yourself say, “ummm…” and “sorry…” and the sound your hoodie makes as it brushes against your ear when you nod your head in agreement emphatically looking for a way out of any conversation. 

Shyness