Adding to the noise

I'm sure everyone has heard how the olfactory sense is probably the most memory-invoking of all our five senses. Which makes sense; I can assume we've all had the experience when we catch a whiff of something and it takes us back to a time and place, and possibly a feeling. I know quite frequently I catch a whiff of some time of incense or perfume (I never know what it is) and it takes me back to standing in my great-grandma's bedroom with other family members and relatives, as she neared her final day. I can't put my finger on what the smell actually comes from, but every time I experience it I associate the scent with death. One time I was in one of those weird oriental-type shops and sniffed a stick of incense; I immediately had to leave the store because of that memory.

My intention of this post is not to depress anyone or myself, but I was thinking about this type of thing because of a CD I was listening to a while ago. I know I just mentioned that the olfactory sense gives us the ability to draw up memories probably more than any other sense, but I feel that our auditory sense is a close second, maybe just as capable of transporting an individual back to a time and place, particularly specific tones and music. I initially pondered this recently when I switched my alert tone for text messages on my phone to a different tone. Not really aware of this at the time, it was the same tone that I was using for texts on my phone in the time surrounding when Jake and I got engaged. I had gotten my cell phone not long before it happened, and had this tone as the default for texts. So the other day when I changed it back to that tone, the first time somebody sent me a text after switching it, I immediately felt this happy, excited, walking-on-clouds feeling, and this was before I noticed the memory. In the microseconds after these emotions, I wondered why I felt that way then traced the reasoning back to when we got engaged and concluded it worked just like the olfactory sense.

Now tonight, I decided to listen to an album I had not heard in a while, Snow Patrol's "Eyes Open". This whole album transports me to a time and so many different emotions, and I recall that the same album has always had this effect on me, because of the synthesis of the music and the time period during which I frequently listened to this music. However, tonight I wasn't thinking about that when I pressed "shuffle" and as soon as the first song, "Open Your Eyes", started playing, I was whisked back to the first semester of college, to when I had my heart broken for the first time, by my first love, and the hazy, obscure time period that followed as I desperately held on to that love. Hearing even just the first few seconds of the song was so compelling that my breath was taken away briefly and I felt that empty, lost feeling once again. It's like for a moment I forgot that I am currently 22 years old, a graduate student, and engaged to be married. It's as though I was 18 again, sitting on my bedroom floor after that phone call. Don't get me wrong; I have so much joy about where I am and where I am headed, personally and as part of another relationship, but it is only human to feel these powerful emotions even long after you've moved on. It's only human to feel hurt and confused and to question "why?", even if you are in a better place.