The Known Smells...
Hello, friends of @adsactly
I am a visually impaired person, so I have had to develop my other senses and one of the ones I have had to perfect is smell. Within my environment, I can recognize the characteristic smells of some people, know the ingredients of some foods by just smelling them, for example. Likewise, I can recognize from a distance the characteristic smell of some things, such as coffee, freshly baked bread, but also freshly cut grass, the sea, even the earth and humidity. Of course, this ability is not only mine. I know many people who have an enviable sense of smell and who are very precise in recognizing some smells. Likewise, there are people who are capable of "smelling" situations, outcomes, lies, traps. Some call it the sixth sense.
I have come across people who usually predict facts just by feeling or "smelling" some things that are invisible or imperceptible to other people. Hence they say, before an event occurs, what will come, in what form and what will be the result. It is, for example, an experienced, matured sense of smell that many successful people boast of.
Francisco Arévalo, a Venezuelan writer and finalist in one of the editions of the SACVEN short story competition, has a story entitled "The Other Morning". In this text, the first-person narrator wakes up one day with a feeling: the government of his country is going to fall. A series of circumstances lead him to sense this outcome and although it is clear to him, to others these signs are not so evident. However, there is another close event that escapes his predictions and that apparently was more obvious to the other characters: the culmination of their love affair:
When I woke up and found the cupboard empty, I knew Monica had left me. That curve I never saw coming. As a baseball player, I saw the ball go through the home plate and strike out in the cold. I thought our relationship was working, but according to the letter she left, the lawyers who represented her in the divorce and even the neighbors, Monica had suffered a lot with our marriage. I, who always smelled where the pitcher was going to make his pitch, could never sense my wife's sadness.
The ability that people may have to read some signs and thus predict future events not only has to do with permanent training or skills that are acquired with maturity, but in some cases they are innate skills, capabilities of the human being that they have since birth. In the case of Francisco Arévalo's story, we see a man who, although he is very skillful in predicting some gambling techniques or senses the fall of his country's government, is clumsy in recognizing what is close to his eyes: the end of his marriage.
Visual and non-verbal, bodily, olfactory, and sensory signals are loaded with significance. The human being is sometimes unable to interpret these messages because of the haste and stress in which he lives. But we are sure that the human being can have the ability to smell some endings, predict them, invoke them. Everything can be felt in the air: from a person's restlessness, sadness, discontent, pain, joy, everything can be smelled if we are not alien, if we are not distant from the other person or the situation. For example, in Venezuela we have felt a smell of freedom at times; in fact, some people have predicted with date and everything, the fall of this government. However, I believe that we have all atrophied our sense of smell, because the regime is more alive than ever.
I hope that this 2020 has started in the best way. I remind you that you can vote for @adsactly as a witness and join our servant in discord. Until the next smile ;)
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE
Several authors (2008). Special edition of the SACVEN national story competition. SACVEN: Venezuela.
Written by: @nancybriti