5

I smell like coffee. This is the remnants of a too-clean and caffeine-filled life.

Once upon a time, I may have smelled like something else, my classic coffee-and-vanilla combo, former from my morning beverage of choice, latter from my perfume, the same perfume I’ve used since the seventh grade. Sometimes I get something like self-pity out of the thought that I, the burgeoning professional, uses the same perfume she used as a zit-pitted middle schooler, but then I remember that I just really like the way I smell, and so what does it matter anyway?

I’m sure at some point, I smelled differently. I must have spent my early years with that unmistakable baby smell, the one that’s impossible to replicate after the age of four. You can use Johnson&Johnson’s baby shampoo and baby wash until you’re thirty, but you’re going to lose that smell. I hypothesize that it has something to do with not maintaining an entirely milk diet. Though I do drink milk, still. It’s childish and unsophisticated, but I love milk. It’s delicious.



Then presumably I spent some time before the whole vanilla perfume debacle smelling something a little different. It’s grown so I can’t smell my own perfume anymore, except for when my whole body heats up and the smell comes off me, almost like baked cookies, or cupcakes. Or in those first moments when I step into a hot shower, and the heat of the water has the same effect on the perfume as does the heat of my body. I love that smell. I wonder if everyone around me can smell me all the time, and if I smell like that. But probably not.

And then sometimes in the summer I use a orange/citrus perfume, just to be a little more summery. And then are those rare days when I forget to put it on, but when you’ve been maintaining a habit since twelve years old, it’s almost hard to forget it. You have to make an effort to not remember.

And then I didn’t start drinking coffee until I was sixteen, for the abomination on my teen years that was the AP examinations. But I didn’t drink it for the caffeine, I continued because I liked the taste. I was the first of my friends to fall off the wagon. And then I didn’t drink it regularly, anyway. Only intermittently, and when I felt like it. And when I could gather up the energy to brew a pot, since my mother and I drank different kinds. I like flavored coffee and she didn’t. Regular was too bitter for me.

And, of course, there has been the difference in shampoos and conditioners and the occasional forage with hair products (again, when laziness does not triumph) that would alter me a little, make me a little less coffee-and-vanilla and a little more cotton candy, which is how I interpret my hair product, designed to control uncontrollable levels of puff.

Then there are the deodorants that have changed, the different laundry detergents, the various levels of hot and sweaty and cold and nipped, of dirty and clean of summer and winter and fall and the smell of a summer rain clinging to my skin or a winter snow sticking in my hair. I have smelled differently before.

But I like the idea of a signature.