sara collie

It was the lilacs that undid me. I could smell them long before I saw them – the air was suddenly thick with their distinct aroma. In a flash, I was transported elsewhere: to France, a decade ago, when I was still in my early twenties, in the back seat of my roommate’s car. I was tired and homesick when I piled myself in amongst my bags and books. Not just for our apartment in the city where we were returning after a weekend at her parents’ house in the middle of nowhere, but for something or somewhere else that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It had been slipping away for a while and I had the sense that I might never grasp hold of it again. At the last minute, my roommate’s mother chopped a small branch of lilacs off the bush in the front garden and handed them to me and I cradled them all the way home, keeping them safe as we bumped and rattled down the unfamiliar country lanes in the late afternoon sun. I was touched by her thoughtful gesture and comforted by the delicate scent which sent me spinning further back in time. To my grandmother’s garden, years and years before, back to when I used to put on ballet recitals for my bemused family on Sunday afternoons, twirling in a black leotard and pale pink tights on the old path. There was a big lilac bush there too: it towered over me in those days. Sometimes, I was allowed to pick a posy of flowers from the garden and, when that bush was in bloom, I always headed straight for it. The sweet perfume of its pale little flowers was so intense, though they never lasted long in a jar. I would bury my face in that bush for what felt like hours, then. Even now, mid-run, I’ve been stood with my nose pushed into the branches that are hanging over a garden fence for a full minute, crying as I inhale the fragrance, remembering what it was like to feel comforted by lilacs, recalling how small and safe I once was, how full of adventure and possibility the world used to be.

Back in the present day, but before I noticed the lilacs, another unmistakable scent was hanging heavy in the evening air: petrichor, rising from the wet grass and warm, damp tarmac. It is Easter Sunday, 2020. All week, the temperature has been rising at a rate unsuited to the gentle days of early April, adding to the pressure-cooker feeling that is building after weeks of lockdown with no end in sight. Rumbles of thunder ushered in an intense storm not long after lunch, and after the rain cleared the air, I felt a need to do the same thing with my own head. There is a lot to process these days, mid-pandemic, and the old familiar weight of anxiety has been growing heavier in the middle of my chest. I know from experience that the only thing I can do to diffuse it is move, and so, having persuaded the laces on my old trainers into a bow and cloaked myself in Lycra, I set off into the early evening for a run.

Running has always been a calming ritual for me: there’s always a point along the way when my thoughts dissolve and I find myself moving on auto-pilot. No matter where I decide to go, I come to a quiet place, characterized by calm. I follow my feet until I’m miles away from anywhere with a headful of nothing but the sound of my own lungs. This trance-like state allows me to process things differently: I seek it out as a way of escaping my tendency to over-think. Normally when I come back round into my body I feel refreshed, soothed and re-energised.

But today, when I came back into the present moment, it was with a huge jolt. Heading straight towards me, was a person wearing a surgical mask. Everything seemed to slip sideways as I tried to make sense of what was going on – not just on the street, but in a wider sense. Somehow, as I was running along, my brain had managed to forget about the pandemic: the thousands of people dying every day; the awful conditions that doctors and nurses are working in; the pain and suffering; the fear that has crept into the edges of all our lives; the lockdown; the loss of work; the stockpiling; everything. It was as though time had briefly stopped without me noticing and was now exploding back into motion, as the last six weeks hit me all at once.

It’s funny how quickly our bodies adapt, how swiftly the strangest of gestures becomes ordinary. Before I can quite understand what is happening I am checking the road behind me and, noticing it is clear (because it’s still possible to die in all of the old, ordinary ways), I am running right out beyond the cycle lane, into the middle of the empty road, giving the person a berth much wider than the suggested 2 meters. My heart is pounding with the shock of remembering; with the guilt that I somehow forgot all the horror for even a moment. I can’t quite believe I was running along oblivious for however many minutes it lasted.

As if to compound the shock, an ambulance suddenly veers around the corner, siren screaming, lights ablaze. From the safety of the pavement, I glimpse the face of the paramedic in the passenger seat as he passes by. His jaw is set firm, his mouth a grim line. I realize that I need to catch my breath and absorb all the information that is re-entering my consciousness so I stop running and pull my headphones out of my ears. I am greeted with absolute silence. Aside from the now-distant ambulance, not a car is to be seen on the usually busy road which leads down to the hospital: this scene would be unthinkable, ordinarily. I start running again, my body instinctively seeking movement, my eyes roaming the street for the next distraction.

There is a method for combating anxiety called the 5-4-3-2-1 technique which involves identifying five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell and one thing you can taste. They need only be very small things: focusing on the list interrupts any spiraling thoughts that you might be having and paying attention to your senses grounds you in your body in the present moment, which helps to alleviate panic. I start to perform this ritual as I run. I can see cherry blossom trees, bluebells popping up in nearby gardens, potholes in the road, the sky glowing orange, cars lined up on driveways. It doesn’t feel like enough to just glimpse things, so I slow down and pull my phone out of my pocket to start cataloguing the flowers, the light, and the signs of life and nature that are lining my route. I tell myself it is so I have something to look at later when I lie in bed awake – an alternative to doom-scrolling the headlines – but it is a habit I often indulge in, even in ordinary times: a deep-seated need to try to preserve fleeting, beautiful things in nature. I notice, as I do every year, how quickly the blossom has already become confetti in the pavement cracks. I am always melancholy at the thought of how brief blossom is, but this year my feelings are dialed up to a deeper kind of despair that is not just about the ordinary passing of time which rolls round every year to punch me in the gut. This year, death is so much more present in everyday life: a real threat that we are all living with and trying to avoid. It looms large on the edges of every photo I take, making the things I have noticed seem insignificantly small and trite. For some people it has come already, so much sooner than they, or anybody, expected. What to do with that thought?

I keep counting, only I can’t do four things I can touch because it isn’t safe to touch anything anymore, so I skip to three things I can hear: more sirens, wailing faintly a few roads away and my breath, fast and gulping. I cannot identify a third sound - this isn’t working as well as it usually does. What to do when the little things that normally comfort me get over-ridden by the darkness of the world? Where do I turn then? Quick, what are two things I can smell? There’s the after-rain scent of petrichor, still heavy in the air, and then that’s when the lilacs get me and everything I was trying to hold together inside me comes pouring out in hot, insistent tears. I cross the street to the branches of just-opened purple blooms and sink my face into them. I am grounded in the now-ness of these tiny flowers and simultaneously transported to the layers of safer, more comforting memories in the past.

I tell myself it’s just a brief escape from the world as it is now, a distraction, nothing more. But as I slip in and out of my memories, I know how important it is to indulge in these ritualistic moments of sensory delight – to live them fully as they present themselves. I know that if I focus my attention on the here and now, I will experience little glimpses of joy that will come and go in real time but endure somehow. I wonder if the moments I am living now, in this new world, are getting laid down in my memory bank, filed under lilac, cross-referenced with cherry blossom confetti and bluebell bonnets so that when I stop to sniff these flowers in years to come, I will be transported back here to a world of deserted streets, masks, sirens and uncertainty. I would rather keep my earlier lilac memories distinct from the world that is unfurling here and now this spring, but what if I can’t? The body remembers what it remembers in whatever way it chooses. Sometimes it offers up a glimpse of something long since passed and I find comfort there; sometimes, slipping out of the present moment involuntarily, even just for a moment, can be perturbing. I can’t control that process, but I can focus on tangible things in the present that make me feel a little better. And right now, that means smelling the lilacs, inhaling their scent in great gulps, like I always do in spring. They won’t last. None of this will.

It is only later, when I am back at home, that I realise I didn’t make it to the end of my countdown ritual – to one thing I could taste. I suppose that means the ritual did its job. Panic averted, I have made it back to safety, for now at least. That is no small thing at all, this year.