Whiff

Stifler^[1] raised the cup of Bouillon powder to his nose and gave a tentative sniff.

"Smells like..." he started, and then paused, aware that there were girls in the room. "...semen," he finished. I still would've said "cum", but then again, I can be blasé like that. It's fun. But anyway, he was right. It did have a scent similar to male ejaculate.



Said aroma does elicit a memory in me - although not initially of that conversation, which happened in my shared kitchen in the first week of university. The memory that the olfactory effect of cum brings up is that of being 18-ish.



It's worth pointing out at this juncture that I didn't always sleep in the place where my bedroom is now. This room was my bedroom for most of my young childhood, and then I was moved into a room on the other side of the house (which is now a bathroom), and then I was moved into another room (which is now my parents'), before being shifted back here. It's been a veritable rollercoaster. It's that third room in which I had most - if not all - of my teenage years, and where I first had Internet access in my room.



I didn't get 'net in my room to look at soft porn, of course. In fact, downloading soft porn wasn't even on my mind at the time. I didn't masturbate, nor did I intend to; I simply wanted to be able to write my LiveJournal and do research for my GCSEs (and, later, A-Levels) in my own room. It makes a lot of sense, when you think about it. I downloaded KaZaA Lite in order to glean a few mp3s of songs which were all labelled "Weird Al Yankovic" but mostly weren't him (like every other teenager in the country), and eventually, out of curiosity, put "Lisa Boyle" into the search box and waited to see what happened. I leeched a couple of scenes from Friend of the Family - including, but not limited to, this one - and they eventually (after many attempts to give up, which mostly involved deleting the files and feeling liberated for a while) became, effectively, my wank fodder.



Ew, that's a really unpleasant phrase.



One scene, in particular, stands out in my memory for this practice. It's not one I've reviewed yet, but I will - in fact, I still have the very same file from the time when I downloaded it about eight or so years ago. It's just on a CDR now, as opposed to a folder placed rather unashamedly on my desktop, safe in the knowledge that my mother would never use my computer. But I loved the file. It was a sexy, sexy sex scene of sexiness, and even all these years on, I still appreciate it for what it is. But I have memories that seem really seedy now... memories of sitting in that corner, in the relative darkness (lit only by a bedside lamp that gave off very little illumination - but I still use!), having orgasms to THE SAME DAMN SCENE AS THE DAY BEFORE, and wiping up with whatever paper came to hand (sometimes just sheets of bleached white A4). I also sometimes exited the room to use the toilet afterwards, and always got the dog glaring at me, as if to say, "I know exactly what you've been doing and I am NOT PLEASED."



But. That's what the scent of cum does for me. It takes me back to that corner, in that room, with that computer, and that scene.



And today, when (for Glod only knows what reason) it was particularly strong, the memory came back again. And, hey, it may as well. I've still got the scene somewhere.



^[1] So called because he looks like Stifler from American Pie.