I have a funny nose.
No, it doesn't tell jokes ("A priest, a rabbi, and a nose walk into a bar..."). And yes it is a bit upturned and fruit bat-ish (this I've been told by small children) but that's not it either. It has a thing about smells.
I can usually remember how a person smells just as well as what they look like. Good smells are very pleasant to me and bad smells send me reeling. I can barely think when I smell a really nice perfume. When I cleaned out the forgotten hamburger out of the refrigerator, I could barely function. Needless to say, I am
very affected by my sense of smell. There's one kinda weird thing, though.
I smell things that aren't there.
For years, whenever I've pushed on my nose, I smell something. Not a "you're smelling your finger" something. It's not anything I've smelled anywhere else. It's a completely
other smell. A phantom smell. Sometimes when people lose their arm or leg, they can still feel the arm. They still sense their phantom limb. For some reason, I sense some mystical energy that has long ago been stripped from my being. Or maybe I just have sensitive olfactories that don't like being stimulated.
I had a friend whose house I used to spend the night at every once in a while. When I'd come home, everything would have the same smell. This mystery smell smelled kinda like pickles, but more bitter. It'd be on my clothes and everything that I took there. But when I let someone else smell my jacket (or something else I had on me) nobody could smell anything. Nobody.
Whenever I came home to visit from college I would freak out. Freak out. Every time. You see, after a while of being there., I'd always have the strange smell on my hands. It was a kinda brackish, crisp smell. I started investigating and realized that it only happened when I was at my
mom's house. If you saw me, you probably would have been very concerned about me because I started sniffing
everything to try to figure out what I touched that was causing the smell. The TV remote, my doorknob, the sink handle, the chairs, the table,
everything. After a while I was completely out of hope. I had no idea what was causing this new, strange smell. Finally, my mom asks if I had tried the ice. Seriously? The ice? No, I hadn't tried the ice. But since I
had tried everything else, I opened the freezer.
It was the ice.
But my mom couldn't smell it. Not on the ice, not on my hands, and not even on her hands. Nothing. Everybody that came over I gave them the ice test, and one by one they failed. No one else could smell it. I was a little concerned and my mom got scared and said "You're moving with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air." I whistled for a cab and when it came near, the license plate said "FRESH" and had a dice in the mirror. If anything I could say that this cab was rare but I thought "Naw forget it, yo home to Bel-Air." I pulled up to a house about seven or eight and I yelled to the cabby "Yo, home smell you later!" I looked at my kingdom, I was finally there to sit on my throne as the prince of Bel-Air.
