Essay: Scent Memory

Content warnings: sexually explicit content, dysphoria, dissociation, allusion to sexual trauma and violence, detailed description of smells and tastes. 

I could still smell her cum on me. Salt-fresh, beachy. I could feel it hitting the back of my throat, coating my tongue. I turned on the shower. I tried to place how she tasted—but the coffee aroma wheel in my head doesn’t have an entry for girl-spunk. 

I let myself drift into the memory of her while the hot water broke against my shoulders, poured down my tits and past the teeth marks she’d left. Being present during sex isn’t always easy for me, so I tend to ground myself to sensations, grabbing onto details to root me in the here and now. The sting and pressure of her teeth on my skin, the soft curve of her dick through her underwear. Her fingers laced with mine. But nothing anchors me like scent. My nose doesn’t just keep me grounded, it lights up my brain like a goddamn pinball machine. 

Your sense of smell, and to a lesser extent, your sense of taste, are unique among the ways you experience the world around you. Touch, proprioception, sight, sound, all get sorted and filtered in the thalamus, your brain’s sensory relay station, before being processed. Smell doesn’t. Olfactory signals jump the curb and blow right past the filter, careening straight into the limbic system like a drunk driver. That’s where memory, emotion—and trauma—live. That’s why the right scent can effortlessly pull you back into the arms of a lover, or drop you into the teeth of a nightmare. 

My nose and I haven’t always had an easy relationship. I used to hate the way my body smelled. Hormones changed that, helped my body become something I could (mostly) trust to hold pleasure instead of shame. One of the first tangible changes for me was my scent. My skin, my underarms, my—see this part is tricky. Because I want to say the words for what I’m talking about. I already said dick up in that first paragraph. But writing the words “my dick” still makes me want to peel my skin off with my bare hands. Seven years in and I don’t like any of the other words either. Anyway. 

Hormones made me smell different. To me, I smelled better, more me. Normal, human body scents became friends instead of enemies, reminders for days when the mirror shows me a stranger—that I’m still me, but I’m not that me. Not anymore. Dysphoria can trick my eyes but it has a much harder time tricking my nose. 

I rinsed off my body wash and hesitated. I didn’t want to wash my hair. It’s long, coppery-red, and no matter what I do to it, wild. Thick and wavy, prone to tangling, it’s perpetually somewhere between bramble and bird’s nest. And it soaks up smells like a sponge. 

When I flopped it over my shoulder and held it to my nose I could still smell her. That cocktail of herbal shampoo, detergent and unplaceable girl-smell wrapped around my brainstem and wouldn’t let go. I didn’t mind. But I always wash my hair after I’m with someone new, just in case. See, I get sweaty, and the smell of my sweaty hair plus someone newcan be like playing a rigged game of Russian roulette—the gun loaded with five of the worst things that ever happened to you. 

The wrong mixture of me and someone else trapped in my hair-smell is a recipe for getting torn, screaming, back through time and locked in a room with the kind of memories you can’t look at without losing parts of yourself. The kind that stick to you even when you manage to claw your way back to the present. Same goes for the tinny smell-taste of water in my sinuses, the chemical burn of chlorine in the back of my throat, and even a few very common commercial perfumes used in hand and body lotion. (Nivea, I’ll never forgive you for telling me your hydro-gel moisturizer was unscented. It‘s extremely scented you lying fucks.) 

Body wash, washcloth, shave, and I smelled like me again. Sandalwood, vetiver, something fruity but not floral. Clove. I like smelling edible and spiced—like I’d make a good latte. These familiar me-smells are as much comfort as they are invitation. When I let someone in close to sniff me I want them to smell the things that make me feel safe. To know me a little better from how I smell. 

An enby I dated briefly once told me I smelled like breakfast. Maple syrup and coffee. A cis guy I fell into bed with entirely too many times liked to say I smelled like his mom and tasted like his ex. (Both of them were cis women so I quietly rejoiced and didn’t think too hard about the subtext. Stop thinking about the subtext.)

You learn a lot about someone when your mouth is on their body. What they sound like when they’re being teased, taken care of, or hurt in just the way they like. Your mouth can injure and soothe, control and surrender. And it can experience your partner(s) almost like any other erogenous zone. 

It’s not the deep, embodied release I get from being fucked, or the electric tide rising and falling and crashing I feel when someone’s head is between my thighs. It’s the tang of sweat on my tongue, my lungs drinking in the riot of smells that make them them in that exact moment. It’s the contrast of the mundane and intimate; floral laundry detergent and sweat-sweet pre-cum. 

That’s the kind of thing that made me fall in love with oral sex. And when I say oral sex let me be clear: I don’t just mean mouth on genitals. It’s 2025. I’m not shy about where I put my mouth, and if you made it this far, I suspect neither are you (whore). I mean mouth and tongue on anything—Nipples, tits, asshole, thigh crease, neck, armpit, belly button, lips, tongue, toes, fingers, even your ear. Oral sex, expansive. 

Smelling, tasting a partner up close, my mouth pressed to their skin—is not only a uniquely intimate act, but it’s one of the best ways I know to keep myself safe in the now, and in the future. Those sensations are written into my memory in ink colored by that exact moment. How my heart’s pounding, how my partner’s breath catches, how they quiver for me. It’s all bound together by the amber scent of her body and the chemical bite of silicone lube as I slide my fingers inside her. I’m bathing my nervous system in a tide of we’re safe and fuck-she-smells-like-heaven.

Every partner, every smell, every taste from a night I chose lights up another bright spot in a limbic system darkened by violence. Every glimmer is a reminder that something good happened, something I chose, and that intimacy doesn’t have to make me bleed—unless I want it to.

I got out of the shower, pulled on a t-shirt and underwear, and stretched out on my bed. It was risky, but I skipped the shampoo this time. My hair was still wet, tangled around me like kelp. It smelled like me, and a little like her—and the scream in my chest stayed quiet.