August 9th: "Humans have very strong scent memory. Tell us about a smell that transports you."

some of the most pungent smells of your life have been types of alcohol, and have been fires and nights you don't remember,have been the smoke from someone else's joint, from someone else's cigarette, the one that you'd tried to steal a drag from, cigarette smoke that you have now taken inside of you and have made part of your scent, part of yourself. Fires make you think of that one nightclub, the one with the outside smoking area and the fires with wide grates around it, grates that stopped drunk girls from clattering into the flames, had stopped drunk boys from shoving their buddies into. The nightclub where a girl had once told you she'd had a crush on you for two years, where you'd kissed her in the middle of that almost room, the roof not quite meeting above you.

there's been a blur of faces, a blur of smells, a blur of moments, of lifetimes, inside those walls, trying to see the stars between the small gaps in the roof, trying to see the stars when you can't see the drink in your hand, when you can't see your friend's face. you suddenly wake up, or something. some motion that feels like waking up, and you're in the middle of a conversation, and you have a different drink, and you think you must have danced for hours, because your feet dimly hurt. you don't remember, don't even realise you don't remember, not until you wake up in your bunkbed later and check you brought everything home and your jeans smell like fire and smoke and the beer someone else spilt on them (you don't drink beer, never have done). You don't know it yet but there is a time, later in your life, when you no longer frequent this particular place, when you drink less than you did that one summmer, way less, in fact, where that smell, that old beer smell, will remind you viscerally of somewhere else, will remind you of long hours stood behind a bar, long hours pouring pints forpeople that will always complain. Instead you linger on nights you don't remember, nights where you could have done anything, nights that you regretted the next day but now you long for, long for the freedom and the laughter and the sheer revelry that can happen when anxiety is laid aside through a large helping of an intoxicating substance.

Fire is freedom, in some part of you those two things are inextricably linked, the smell of woodsmoke and the strobe lights, cigarette smoke and the boom in your chest, the bass rumbling through you as you close your eyes and try to reach the holy land of this kind of freedom, the place that you don't ever remember quite reaching. One day you'll visit alone, just for an hour or two, just to experience that crushing exhilaration without eyes upon you, without anyone to judge you, without anyone to make you stop and judge yourself. You always come up lacking.