My Nose and Lost Love

It is strange how much perception and recollection the sense of smell can provide. I typically have very poor olfactory reception, but sometimes it kicks in double-time. Today while I was sitting in my Transcendentalism class, I--by chance--caught the scent of the boy sitting next to me and was suddenly transported three years into the past. His natural scent (and I'm not talking about "B.O."--his natural clean aroma) was very similar to my high school boyfriend's. Instantly, I remembered vignettes from our courtship in incredible detail--little things that had been long buried in my subconscious. For about five seconds I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Luckily, I lost the scent. I'm glad that my nose decided to stop functioning at that moment, because a class about poetry supplemented with an eerily strong redolent of lost love would have been poignantly irritating.