Thursday, June 28, 2007

Kindergarten Nostalgia

There is a smell. When it comes, I get butterflies in my stomach. I mean, my heart misses a bit out of some sort of unfamiliar fear.
It happens now and then, like today, walking towards caltrain. I think a lady walking by me was wearing the perfume.
Every time it happens, I search in my head and my heart to find out what this brings up.Some smells, like "America smell" are known. It's the smell that all the suitcases and magazines from America have. It's funny how even my bags and clothes smell like "America" only when I take them to Iran.
But this smell, it reminds me of my kindergarten, perhaps the first day and the fear of it. I stop and say to myself "I'll think about it and will figure out what this is later".
The thought, though, is slippery. I can't hold on to it. I can't figure it out. It's frustrating. Memories come on top of one another, get complicated, and I can't disentangle them. It's scary, I basically don't remember my memories, and that's the way it is; no "I'll remember some day".This is it.
I'm going to call it the kindergarten smell.
Think of a sunny day in Gorgan, in a car with your mom. You stop at the door and are thrown into this place where there is a bear to scare bad kids. If you're nice, you'll be fine. You also pray and chant this scary song before eating. you have to adjust; and you have to wait to go back to the familiarity of your home.
Somehow, this brings out a train of images of all your life in that city. All the mundane minutes of "YOUR" life that has passed already. Those lazy afternoons..
The hope to have you teacher say: your mom called and said you should go to "fariba joon's" for lunch today. AKKH, that joy. That feeling of importance. Those dark Friday evenings when "Azaan" was on TV, and everyone was upstairs getting ready for a party. The sound of your mom's blow drier. The safety of knowing they are upstairs, when you were in the living room, ready to go out. Worries about which shoes to wear, and whose opinion counts more, baba's or Kaveh's?
Worries, loves, fears...every little feeling you had and you have forgotten now.
And the thought that you don't remember the person you were; You no longer are the person you were.

All of that, is in that one moment when the kindergarten smell arrives.

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