Brain Damage Smells Like Nothingness

A eulogy to an unsung sense

Losing your sense of smell is a funny thing. It really drives home how much we undervalue it. For it can’t compare to the horror of losing sight or hearing. Yet it’s still a thorough loss.

You suddenly have no idea if laundry is clean, if milk is spoiled, or if there’s a gas leak about to destroy your building. The scent of a woman? Vanished. Frying bacon, fresh-brewed coffee? Like catching a whiff of the void.

On the flip side, visits to the toilet are rendered remarkably neutral. And anyone can become a chilihead with ease. Five star Thai? Hell, make it six. Tequila shots are no longer acts of sadomasochism. So there’s that.

Eating becomes primal, reduced to its essentials. Every bite, every spoonful of anything makes you viscerally aware of what before was mere trivia — that most of taste is actually just smell. Left only with texture plus the most basic of flavors — sour and sweet, salty and bitter — you feel impoverished, like eating cardboard washed down with shadows.

Take ketchup. You get the sweet and the tang, but no hint of tomato. Yet two out of three counts as winning under the new regime. So you slop it on your fries with reckless abandon.

I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel What have I become, my sweetest friend

— Trent Reznor/Nine Inch Nails, “Hurt”

It’s strange what becomes your favorite dish and what’s now revolting, and how quickly the transformation takes place. Pineapple on pizza is no longer just personal idiosyncrasy or the stuff of mindless Twitter threads. It’s Dorothy in Kansas vs. Technicolor.

The simplest things throw you for a loop, the incongruity of the experience. A fresh spritz of cologne, nose pressed to the skin, and nary a scent to be discerned. Only a vague, volatile sense of chemical harshness — gasoline or kerosene — with no sweet, flowery notes to offset it. Deodorant smells like nothingness.

In fact, you have no idea if you, yourself, smell. You haven’t showered in days, so not an unreasonable assumption, but nor is it a certainty. And of course, some percentage of folks out there wouldn’t be able to tell anyway, for the same reason as you.

Triple vaxxed, to no avail. Fuck you, SARS-CoV-2. Fuck your ridiculous acronym. Fuck your spike protein. Fuck your global pandemic, your chaos and disruption, your utter senselessness.

You want to know what COVID smells like? Exactly what you’d think. It smells like absence, like nothingness. Like nihilism coded into barely-alive strands of random DNA.

Colby Hess is a freelance writer and photographer from Seattle, and author of the freethinker children’s book The Stranger of Wigglesworth.

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