21/12/2024
SPECIAL EVENT: SOW de Parfum 📚
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Writing submission form: https://forms.gle/1op5k5UBYWvgPGP37
🕰 Deadline: 30/12/2024
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“SOW de parfum” is a special series of personal anecdotes tied to unforgettable scents, told by SOW members. Through these stories, we tell moments of love, longing, and nostalgia—each beautifully captured in a perfume profile inspired by those memories.
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(books)
“I’ve spent years and years folded between the pages of books. I found forming relationships with books deep with meaning and different than with humans. I’ve experienced love, loss, power, adolescence, all from them, embedding every world into my own. Each book was different. The smell, the texture, the story. One is filled with laughter, wholesome memories whilst the other contains histories of grief, the feeling of sorrow, pain. They reek of an earthy smell, deep with worn out paper - invigorating the ink is.
When I was younger, books didn’t catch my interest much. They were just pieces of paper wrapped up in one story that could take you ten hours to finish when movies took two. I hated the tiny letters, I hated the images and metaphors, I hated the covers and especially, I hated the smell. Books, to me, smelled rusty, like a chain of continuous nightmares. Despite that, I’ve always tried to love it, over consuming them, storing them on my wooden shelves above my desk. But never bothered to touch them within a few hours after purchasing.
It wasn’t until third grade that I started falling in love with the flowy letters. The smell of old books scrupulously sitting on the shelves had become my comfort. To be completely honest, I do not remember how my love for books started. Though, whenever I slip into my cozy blanket with a mug of steaming hot chocolate in one hand and a book in the other, looking outside the window to see the autumn’s air, I always feel a sort of nostalgia.
My fondest memories with books are all of the times when it’d made me cry. Tears raced down my face as my eyes turned puffy red. By then, I’ve already seen myself live through the story. I’ve been there when a character dies and witnessed sadness. But it wasn’t just in tearjerkers, I’ve also cried in books about friendship or love. I like that I was feeling what the protagonist felt, an emotion far past what a person could automatically feel. I understood the characters, their quiet, private moments to their strong, care-free ones.
In every crease there was a special bond between me and the pages. One I could never form with anyone else. My world, as I would describe it, is like interlinked bundles of words made of memories in my life. I am the writer of these words, carefully lacing each moment together, creating a book that’s my life. Books are like hundreds and thousands of friends telling me their stories, each inspiring me somehow. They teach me friendship, sacrifice and letting go. The ink doesn't seem to confuse me anymore, instead, they dance through November, leaving back illustrations of the settings from each chapter.
These pages that are binded up together have become my home, a place of relaxation mixed with suspense. Their stories are lessons and different universes that I will never forget. The scent of them is engraved in my brain, letting me sense the woody, smoky smell even in the midst of the ocean. Shadows which represent the aroma will always linger around me, even when the sun dips and the moon rises, even all the way to the end of the world.”
✒️ Nguyễn Anh Thư
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Email: [email protected]
Facebook: Spirit of Writing - Wellspring
Editor-in-chief: Nguyễn Hồng Ngân - [email protected]
