My roommate has an overactive olfactory. Everything always smells like something. The first words out of his mouth when he gets home are usually about what the apartment smells like. And it’s usually really obscure, or something that doesn’t have a smell, in and of itself. Like he’ll be like “Ugh, it smells like a t-shirt in here.” Or, “Jesus, it smells like a handful of paperclips in here.” Sometimes he’ll get excited and want me to smell something. “Will, smell this, it smells like a Transformer action figure out of the package from 1984 during a hot day.” I keep waiting for it to get worse, I keep waiting for him to start smelling concepts of things. “Christ, open a window, it reeks like a contract in here.”

I hope he loses his sense of smell when he’s an old man.

Posted 26th March, 2012