Bouquet

The scent of close-quarters living

We are instructed to choose a bouquet based on scent. It can be anything—a bunch of grocery store flowers, a cinnamon broom, a bundle of fresh herbs—so long as its smell is the primary reason for choosing it, rather than its looks. I select a bundle of lilies. They are $9.99 at Whole Foods supermarket. The florist near me is selling the same flowers for $30. I run into Michael from the book club at Whole Foods. We chat about what we’ve been up to. He’s taking a break from the club for a bit while he focuses on other things. I unconsciously punctuate my sentences with the bouquet of lilies while we chat, as though they’re a magic wand or a baseball bat.

Though I didn’t choose them for their looks, lilies are rather striking. They have a primordial look to them, with their big fleshy blooms and stamen and pistils reaching out like antennae. The interiors of their petals are streaked with a watercolor swath of magenta and have rows of crenelations like teeth deep within the flower. They look like something out of the Jurassic era.

I bring the bundle of flowers home and chop off the bottoms of their stems so they’ll fit into my vase. I wonder if I should keep the stems as part of the bouquet—they have a kind of artichoke or fresh asparagus smell to them: bitter, green, and vegetal. The stems don’t fit in the vase so I toss them in the trash. The lilies are in various states of bloom: a few are fully open, a couple are on their way to blooming, and several are still fully closed. The closed blooms look like little alien pods. Like if I lean in too close they will burst open, spitting a corrosive acid that will dissolve my face. The smell of the blossoms is heady, green, and damp, a humid echo of the flowers’ native environment, as if they are calling back to their home. It’s sweet and rich mixed with something that smells a bit indolic and bathroom-y.

The smell of the bouquet doesn’t change much over the course of the week. At times it becomes stronger, sweeter and more redolent. As the flowers wilt they lose some of their scent but they don’t seem to produce any novel fragrances over the course of their decay, perhaps because the wilted flowers are quickly replaced with new blooms that dutifully open one after another every few days.

Throughout the week I become more aware of the scents around me. Living in a tiny, ancient apartment building means that space is always shared. Any sense of true privacy is illusory. The air around me is not my own and there are constant reminders of the neighbors, creating a bouquet of intermingled olfactions that continuously shift over the course of the day. Cooking smells are the most prevalent: simmering garlic and herbs, sautéing onions, savory meats, but mostly the comforting, nutty aroma of steamed rice. It snakes through my apartment at regular intervals throughout the day, mingling with my own scents.

Other shared scents are sporadic rather than quotidian. The smell of temple incense permeates the building throughout the year on special occasions that are foreign to me but familiar to the neighbors. One day, while the lilies are still in bloom, the scent of frankincense and benzoin floats through the kitchen window and into my living room, adding a rich, resinous base to the lilies’ floral fragrance. I google “holidays today” and I am directed to the website www.nationaltoday.com, which tells me every holiday that is currently happening. Scrolling through the list, I find BUDDHA DAY announced alongside Straw Hat Day, International Break the Glass Ceiling Day, National Senior Fraud Awareness Day, and Turn Beauty Inside Out Day—a day dedicated to “putting an end to the media’s self esteem breakers.” The website suggests I celebrate Buddha Day, also known as Vesak, by attending a Vesak ceremony at a Buddhist temple, committing to the five precepts of Buddhism, and/or giving to charity. I smile and wave when I pass a neighbor’s open door in the hallway, as little trails of incense curl from her entryway. Nationaltoday.com does not say whether or not it is polite to wish someone a happy Vesak so I decline to acknowledge the holiday.

Other smells can feel dangerous or alarming. Sometimes the scent of burning Joss paper floats through the halls, setting off smoke detectors. I emerge from my apartment and the neighbors greet me and assure me everything is alright as flames lick the side of a stainless steel bowl they use to contain the burning paper. Several buildings in the neighborhood have burnt down over the last few years, so being on high alert for fire does not feel overly cautious.

The intermingled smells are a mostly-pleasant reminder of our intertwined lives, of how we are all doing the same or similar things separately but together. At night, when I’m unable to sleep, I often picture everyone in the building nestled down in their beds, separated by walls and floors but safe and warm, comfortably drowsing together. I think of the neighbors on my floor, then the one below, all the way down to the ground floor, then to the buildings to the left and to the right, spreading out further and further across the whole city, a nest of sleeping people.

More soon <3