Parosmia (again)
Another note about parosmia, but no lies this time. I’ve identified a mystery smell. It’s been more than a year since I had COVID, and my senses of taste and smell are still a bit strange. They are very subdued and muted, by which I mean, smells and tastes are mostly as they are supposed to be, only with very little intensity — that’s the overall state of it — but also a little fucked up, and by fucked up I mean the phenomena, still, of completely new and inexplicable and sometimes horrendous smells and tastes which hit you inside the face with an extreme intensity. It is just incredibly weird.
One in particular has stuck around for me. It smells industrial, like something burning; rubber, or plastic, or some other producer of very dark-smoked, fumey fires. This summer sometimes it’s been so overwhelming I’ve been kind suppressing gag reflex in the street, trying not to make horrid retching noises as I speed home. There are three separate construction projects within two hundred yards of me (every single one of them is a student housing block), and in day-times the noise of them has occasionally been relentless, so I just assumed it was those sites which were also producing this bizarre and disgusting burnt smell. Sometimes it’s not there at all, sometimes it’s overwhelming.
Earlier, the smell was getting too much for me, and I thought I might have to go home again, when the person walking in front of me stopped suddenly and turned around. He was one of the lads from the tyre shop round the corner (if you were wondering: yeah, very). He was smoking a joint.
And it all fell into place. It’s weed. This smell of burning plastics or electrical fires. I would never have guessed in a million years, it smells so chemical and synthetic. This is how the anosmia or parosmia symptoms, as I’ve had them, are so very weird: the smells aren’t just slight distortions of reality, they completely wrench it into something barely recognizable, barely describable, because you’ve never experienced anything quite like it before, and only by tenuous comparison can you get close to articulate what it’s like. As if something managed to short-circuit your vision into seeing an entirely new colour, one that didn’t exist in the world, and which you’d never seen before. (There was a short story by someone like Wells or LeFanu about a similar idea, the discovery of a new color, which I’m fairly sure was somehow made into a film.)
Before all this, I’d never thought of smells as having texture — I’d encountered them more like single colours. Tastes, maybe, had texture, distinct from the feeling of the actual texture of food. Certainly sounds. But I now my memory of a strong odour of weed or skunk is that it was somehow viscous, a bit like water loosely stirred into molasses. While now I encounter it as having a kind of burr or grain to it, raw and tender, like a textured paving slab, like running your front teeth fast across a woodchipped wall, or like a bassoon in high-register played flutterzunge — or, all of the above with a pulsing electrical current run through it. That last bit, the current, is the thing, really: it’s as if while smelling it, you’re touching an industrial battery, it feels like it’s harming you with a very fast vibration. Disconcerting, and not pleasant.
Around new year I wrote a ‘journal’ of COVID taste/smell which started off true, but then swerved into the wildly unreal. (Entirely accidentally it was a fun test of “who among the people responding to this has read to the end?”) I’m tempted to go back to it, and rework it, because, I mean — maybe some of it wasn’t that wild after all. Even after a year things are still very weird. I hope it fixes itself, but clearly these things take years, and clearly the healing is not linear; it comes and goes, gets better and then gets far worse again. Some tastes are back. Some things are still broken. I miss the taste of olives. And I’m aware that compared to many people — I joined a few online support groups, when it got really bad — I have it, these days, mildly. But I wouldn’t mind if it the smell of weed on the way home didn’t make me feel a little like I was biting down on a small electrical motor which was somehow, also, on fire.