Thursday. Cafeteria. Lunch.
I am eating and I am being very quiet about it, because what is happening to my senses has been escalating for two weeks and the cafeteria is the place where it is loudest and I have not yet figured out how to turn the volume down.
The smell hits first. I walk in and the room arrives before I see it — two hundred bodies, their food, the cleaning products on the floor, the layered olfactory weather of every emotion being felt by every person in the building. Anxiety has a sharp edge, like citrus going bad. Affection is softer and warmer, something like fresh bread. Boredom is almost nothing — a faint flatness, the smell equivalent of beige.
I have a theory about this. The theory is that I am not actually smelling emotions but the chemical signals that emotions
