Lily Hunt Weekly Creative Writing 1

As I sit and listen to the class silently work, I smell the heater warm up, a smell like burning dust. And that burning dust reminds me of the hopelessness I feel inside, how wistful I am. The sweet, sweet smell of despair fills my nose and I turn my head away in disgust of myself.
I realize now that this enticing scent I smell isn’t just Mrs. Meliton’s daughter’s candy, but the horrible, gripping emotion of hopelessness I feel coiling itself around my heart. It’s a sweet but pungent smell, something like a sour lemon candy. I can smell hints of despair and lost friendship sprinkled above it like cinnamon.
The tower of beautiful, macabre scents continues to pile as I dig deeper and find the smell of the heater again, attached to my heart in the form of joy. It’s a rather large attachment, surprisingly, but hard to find nonetheless. Altogether, my little mix of scents wells up behind my eyes and sinuses, and brings out a tired yawn.
As I breathe in that long, somber yawn, I can smell even more in my little corner in bright little classroom 101. I smell Lukas’s cologne—maybe it’s strong deodorant—and am swept back into another wave of overpowering, odiferous emotions. I can match the cologne with a memory, but also with a feeling.
Someone I knew once, someone who made me very happy, wore cologne very much the same. And, like I so often do, I tied the scent to an emotion. I can’t put a name on that emotion, but I know that the musky, spicy cologne belongs as much on that old feeling, something like losing a part of your heart, to a new feeling of restarting and working harder to find a new someone.
And when I almost found that new someone, I was somewhere where I could smell the vinyl off of a fake leather chair. As I sit in my beanbag chair and lay my head back, I can smell almost the same kind of vinyl. And with it, I feel hope. I feel the hope that with every new scent that I can tie to an emotion, I can push myself farther in life and find that new someone so that I won’t feel the sweet smelling, pungent emotion of despair again.