…“all my body functions smell like crying”.
I was obsessed with that line for months after it. The idea of cum, shit, piss, blood, and all the viscera of a human smelling like crying was just too much for me to take. I want to run over to that person and shake them, demanding an explanation of that amazing bit of dialog. But I’ve never been very good at doing things like that, even though that line would haunt me, as have so many others. The science behind this line is odd. How much data was collected, and by what methodology? Did she notice first that her tears and saliva share the same olfactory experience? Was it blood, or mucus? Did she not take measurement and simply run with it from that first eureka moment of “my spit smells like crying”? Or, I pray not, was it in a moment of terror she found an epiphany? Had she been hit by a spurned lover, blood coming from her nose, tears from her ducts and that stringy saliva from her quivering and mashed lip, and said, in a lucid tone beyond the situation, “huh, this all smells the same”? I’ll never know if it was metaphor, or truth, or some hybrid blend of reality that only she could perceive. I don’t remember her face, or voice, or whether or not it was, in fact, a she. So, the hopes of this mystery being resolved seems slim.
Or, this is a theory I’ve recently developed, was it that I misheard the statement? Was I the architect of that thought, pushing it to my earshot neighbors? In the end, it doesn’t matter. In the end I lived a moment of strangeness that will only be rivaled when next I overhear something, when sitting alone, thinking of the various smells of crying.