Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Kerosene

I am ready to run away. The only things that keep me in place are a series of particular olfactory memories of a time when once, I was free. They have come to symbolise a dreamy point in my existence, before I left those smells, before I fell full thrust into my bewildering new life that began promisingly with a shiny blue bike but eventually became a tale of grown ups and grown up troubles and raised voices and emotional roller coasters and sadness and joy and sorrow and happiness and gloom, cemented with cheap cement that cracked under the slightest pressure.

All my 8 pounds kicked away painfully down the canal of my mother's womb, screeching to sniff the earth, so they say. I arrived on cue, as my mother was asserting her rights to be herself. It turned out that this robust baby with curly hair and plump skin and shiny eyes inadvertently became a physical, mental and ultimately, emotional symbol, of my mother's fight and eventual flight to freedom.

A freedom which remains deep within me, passed as it was from mother to daughter in a blood flow of thoughts and pain. It is a primal call, that seeks to knock, harder and harder upon the inside of my skull, desperate, caged, and screeching as I did on arrival into the world, but politely tucked inside my folds of innards and blood and cells, where no one can hear or see.

When I want to run away, I remember kerosene. Its smell. Its vapory essence filling my nose with comfort, as the large stove it lit boiled our daily bath water, how the same water spilt and burnt my grandmother's foot, leaving its imprint as a mysterious white map for years to come. How the roaring, noisy blue flame said efficiency and calm and warmth and comfort and towels and powder. Despite the dog-eared fact that any build up of its gases could blow the apartment right out through its windows.

My first olfactory memory. Kerosene.