Variations on Yankee Candle Scents
A Calm & Quiet Place
To produce the scent of A Calm & Quiet Place, harbor a near-constant fear of anywhere outside your bedroom. Become shaky when speaking to a stranger, develop nausea at the thought of going to a party or bar and embarrassing yourself, and, therefore, never go. Contemplate all the times your anxiety proved credible, such as the first party you went to but didn’t want to, sophomore year of high school, when the cops came and left, but you still threw up a pile of black-tinted bile immediately after from a mix of distress and dark liquor. Ask your mom to order your food in public until you get to college. Spend a chunk of time in each friendship explaining that it’s hard for you to be social, to be normal, multiple days a week. Keep secrets if only to preserve the peace in your relationships. Treat each day home alone like a resort experience, because it’s the one time silence is in your hands. Realize that living in a big city makes you miserable, because there is rarely any calm or quiet. Lay in your bedroom, door closed, and daydream about living out west, where the open spaces are eggs split apart, free to run whichever way one chooses.
Sun and Sand
To produce the scent of Sun and Sand, give your high school best friend with the perhaps-too-cool dad a twenty and wait for the text that the beer has arrived. Drink too much and plan a trip to Florida, where the same friend has a perhaps-too-cool mom with a beachfront apartment. At the age of seventeen, catch a flight with one other minor and an eighteen-year-old from Nashville to St. Petersburg, Florida; call an Uber for the ride to the beach. Next discover that your friend’s mom smokes weed, which you’ve never tried before, but you will now. Scrawl a grocery list of alcohol: something cheap for beer pong, something flavorful for fun, something hard for shots. Find yourself sleeping on the floor in an apartment the size of a regular home’s living room. Slam your knee against the grey, stone table in the backyard where a sheet of plywood is topped with Solo cups, matching the color of the blood running down your knee. Don’t notice the blood until morning, when it’s dry and matted into your hair. Drink enough to wobble, take hits from a pipe, and walk down to the beach with your friends at sunset. Watch the sky turn orange, pink, and red all at the same time. Sift through piles of sand with your numb hands and wonder if it ever gets better than this.
Color Me Happy
To produce the scent of Color Me Happy, you have to use your imagination. Imagine that your parents kept their marriage together and you didn’t spend every other weekend packing up necessities like a Nintendo DS and a pay-by-minute flip phone. Imagine that splitting your life between a home and an abusive household didn’t foster severe anxiety. Imagine that Caneyville, Kentucky, with its population of 612, faded brick post office (originally built in 1837), and cobwebbed storefronts isn’t a place you know well as the pitstop between your parent’s homes. Use that same imagination to yank yourself out of those therapy sessions scheduled on and off throughout your teenage years, and instead place yourself wherever a happy teenager may be, perhaps in Caneyville back when the Kentucky Cardinal train still ran through from Louisville to Memphis, Tennessee. Imagine, then, the Planter rumbling down to New Orleans from Memphis with you onboard, reading the poetic names of other Illinois Central Railroad trains: Green Diamond, Magnolia Star, Sunchaser, Land O’Corn, Panama Limited, and so on. The Limited being the northbound from New Orleans, the one that would lead you back home, to Kentucky, to where your imagination is taking you from. Instead, imagine your several block walk from the train station to the French Quarter, to Café du Monde and its crisp beignets and warm café au lait. Imagine that this moment is finally one you don’t wish to leave behind.