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man #1: i'll hire you.

man #2: how much will you pay me?

man #1: do you want money, or your life back?

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I'm twenty-two, and I'm in my sister's decimated old high school bedroom, throwing things away.

Everything is here, I think, wading through twenty-one years of accumulated girljunk. Soup to nuts. From wrinkled unicorn sticker sheets to random college papers on Cormac McCarthy or crowdsourcing. Vaguely embarrassing notes passed in photojournalism, more acutely embarrassing journal entries from junior high, brochures about abstinence or job fairs, single socks, broken Christmas ornaments, postcards from high school friends, hemp necklaces from camp. Little jars of Play-Doh, sheets and sheets of stickers, those photos that have stuck it out for years, despite the fact that everyone is just a little too far away and eternally out of focus.

I pick up a rubbery Camp Longhorn bracelet, and I see the sun on the lake, feel cold ice cream on my tongue, hear a girl laughing, her arm around my back, but that's all. I flip through photos of classmates, but only remember weird things about them, like, He only ate Zebra cakes for lunch every day sophomore year, and, She wore a Kerrville Folk Festival t-shirt once. I read notes from old friends about boys I can't recall, fill a bag with bracelets and cross necklaces from dozens of youth retreats.

They are all those kinds of things that you can neither keep nor throw away, except today I'm throwing them away. I'm just tired of carrying around the girl I used to be, all her many versions, feeling responsible for her. Sometimes it feels like she's a younger sister who took off a long time ago and never came back, leaving me with nothing but guilt, her image, and her seven thousand yearbooks. I just want to get rid of the evidence. I crave light travel.

It's when I'm shuffling through yet another stack of papers that I catch it, this scent on the air, in the tips of my fingers. What is it? It smells delicious, like heaven. It's as faint as it could possibly be, the step before nonexistence. It's so alluring, for some reason.

I brush my fingers against my nose, dip my face down and breathe in while flipping through the papers again. It's there, not so much in the sheets as in the air around them. I pull one of the sheets out at random and scan it. It's a form in French, my visa information painstakingly recorded in cramped writing.

And I remember. I remember waiting for our bags at Charles de Gaulle, frustrated, confused, euphoric all at once. I remember this same scent, filling the air, lovely and familiar, jarring in a foreign airport. Heaving my luggage off the conveyor belt, feeling the damp against my leg. Unzipping the outer compartment of my bag and seeing the glittering, crushed glass, shards as fine as sand, as bright as snow.

I've forgotten so many faces and conversations, but not the swell of Brighton Laughter in that sterilized baggage claim. I was twenty, and I thought, This is the most delicious scent in existence. When I am ninety, I will remember the shape of it in my nose, the way it felt like something new, like fear, like this woman I want so badly to be. This shattered perfume bottle was the first thing to greet me in this other country, and someone else might have taken this as a bad sign, but I knew what it was. An offering, an absurdly lavish, broken blessing.

Everywhere we walked that day, we carried with us the smell of laughter, of good omens. For whatever reason, this is what I chose to remember. I saved the visa form. I couldn't find the scent on anything else.