smell

That's yesterday morning. It was not the first time (well the second time) I walked down the empty long hallway but suddenly I felt the smell of that school building. There was nobody else around and it was exactly the same smell I breathed in three or four years ago inside some school buildings at UMCP. It was subtle that I couldn't tell where it came from..the paint? stuff they put in when making white paper? or a mixture of several things? But I was pretty certain that's the exactly same smell. Strangely, it brought my mood all the way back to that girl years go in Maryland where she's timid and shy and intimidated. I was timid and shy and intimidated that whole morning. Ah, creepy, if it's really true that smell controlled me..

A little research from Wikipedia...

"Olfaction, the sense of smell, is the detection of chemicals dissolved in air. The chemicals themselves, generally at very low concentrations, are called odors. ...As discovered by Linda B. Buck and Richard Axel (who were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2004), mammals have about a thousand genes for odor reception. Of these genes, only a portion are functional odor receptors. Humans have 347 functional odor receptor genes; the other genes have nonsense mutations....As of yet, there is no theory that explains human olfactory perception completely."