Amber Romance

I just bought a new bottle of perfume. It's not actually a new perfume for me, but it's been a couple of years since I've worn it religiously and I decided to purchase another bottle because I've always quite liked it.

I didn't realize how strongly the smell is linked, for me, to that day back in college when I bought my first bottle. It turned out to be a particularly emotional day, and the months that ensued were not my easiest or brightest, but the nostalgia that hits me from one spritz of this perfume is not a foreboding sort of nostalgia, it's a regular sort of nostalgia for my more naïve self, coupled with an empowered feeling that I can clear hurdles and build bridges if I was able to get through those difficult months.

It also hit me late last night and early this morning in the form of a renewed love for journalism. Or maybe that was from the article I just turned in. But ironically, I began work on my first investigative feature story only a few days after I bought this perfume, I wore it all the way through the writing and the researching for the story, and it was from that time that my work was really appreciated at my college paper and I began considering a career in journalism.

Unfortunately, I've been feeling lately like I don't identify much with journalism anymore, but I'm thinking now that maybe it's just that I don't identify whatsoever with what I've been writing about lately. As a journalist, I have become miraculously good at finding some way to identify with every single thing I write, no matter how strange or small, but this job for some reason made me build a wall between myself and my sources and subjects, and as a result I haven't really enjoyed anything I've written. Today, however, my desk isn't visible under the papers and folders and notebooks I've been using to write this story. I like the sight of a well-used work space and I love the feeling of engagement, of reading something I've written that, finally, after hours of feeling like it's boring, fragmented, or not going anywhere, finally comes together when it's all done.

This is not to say that I won't despise this piece later, once it's been edited, or feel slightly nervous as usual when I see it in print, but I think this smell on my wrists is a good kick in the butt to get myself out there and start freelancing or pitching the stories that I really want to write. I'll still have to write the other ones, too, but right now, I'll take what I can get. Any maybe now, with a couple of bricks from that wall cleared away, I can start enjoying those too.