Olfactory Fornication

A few months ago I was doing my usual LRT commuting to work on a dreary weekday when all of a sudden I smelt something in the air. It was sweet... not sugary sweet but a nostril-dilating sweet. The simliar effect you get when you sniff eau de toilette straight from a freshly-pressed nozzle. It was bit of a unisex oceanic scent and maybe the slightest hint of floral top notes. But this was a lot more invigorating, more enticing, than anything else I had sampled before. I looked around wondering who brought the scent into the LRT. But when you're travelling during rush hour, the smell sort of lingers around everybody. It disappeared shortly after I detected it but I stepped off at my stop at Bangsar still feeling a little lighter-headed and thinking: If sex was a smell, that would be it.

The following week, I was doing the same thing, trying to find space between the cracks of heavy businesspeople and students listening to their discmans at full volume. The rancid stench of sweat, B.O. and cheap perfume was giving me the usual case of anosmia when THAT SMELL OF SEX hit me again. I felt like a chained sniffer dog being teased with a hidden bag of heroin. Who the heck was wearing it? What brand of scent was it? The closest I could put my finger on it was Tommy Hilfiger's True Star... with an extra douse of ethanol. It was driving me nuts. If only I knew who the scent-wearer was, I would find out the exact time and exact place she (or he) gets on and off and relish the time I could spend with her (or him) in the train, standing next to that person and bathing in the intoxicating fumes and staggering to work all flushed, glassy-eyed, and ready for work.

For the next few months I would actually look forward to commuting to work, wondering if I would be stepping on that same fateful morning LRT train which the mystery sex-smell person would also board. It would happen once in a while, but without any success in discovering the wearer.

Until today.

I had gotten off my usual Bangsar stop and was approaching those things that suck up your tickets before you leave the station when FWOOP-PAH, I got smacked in the face with the waft of a thousand orgasms. I looked ahead and there she... he... shite. There were TWO people walking in front of me. Doing their brisk businesspeople power walk. The fair-skinned woman was wearing a lilac suit and had long shampoo-ad hair, while the tanned burly man was wearing grey pinstripe. It was definitely either one. I followed their queue.

*soop!* The woman's ticket disappeared into the ticket-sucking booth. She breezed off.
*soop!* The man's ticket disappeared into the ticket-sucking booth. He strode off.

Right behind the man, out of sheer wild-eyed desperation, I shoved my ticket into the ticket-sucking slot. It didn't accept my ticket.

NOOOOO

The booth let off the temporary alarm and before I could slot the ticket in again and zoom past, the automatic even-a-toddler-can-do-hurdles-on-this barriers closed in on me. Trying to look my civilised best during rush hour, I ended up not jumping, and all I could do was stare through the morning haze, at the mystery sex-smell suspects doing their sex-smell businesspeople power walk in slow motion and disappear down the stairs to the right. The barriers finally opened and instead of stalking, I decided to drag my Made-in-Thailand corduroy pumps down my own route towards the stairs on the left. I was disillusioned. I was so close. But I was so late. For work.

Waitaminnit... I was late for work. I'd usually smell it on the LRT when I was punctual. Which meant that I had all this time been ruling out the possibility that more than one person could be wearing it on a regular basis. Which meant that my chances of eventually catching at least one person wearing the smell would actually be higher than I had ever expected.

I staggered to my office flushed, glassy-eyed but completely unprepared for work. Instead I logged on to the internet, got onto my blog and wasted the first two hours of the day telling you my wonderful story about the morning I almost found my delicately-fragranced sex fairy princess. Or prince. Whatever.