When I was 18 I worked at ChiChis. I bussed tables and prepped the fried ice cream and rolled silverware and other random things. I worked evenings. My car broke down after my shift one night and I didn't have a cell phone and I was by myself on the highway. I sat in the drivers seat thinking for a minute and then went in the trunk and grabbed a wrench. I was walking home. I was just past the State St exit on 94, toward Ypsi. I lived off Textile. Long stroll. It was chilly out but not cold, moisture in the air, crisp on the skin. I walked in the grass to be as off the road as I could. I'd only been going for about ten minutes when a car slowed down and pulled over. I gripped the wrench in my hand immediately. It was a 40, maybe 50, something couple. A man was driving, his wife (?) in the passenger seat. Everything in the universe told me not to get in that car, but I did. I climbed in the back seat with the wrench pressed flush up my arm under my sleeve, I don't know why I hid it. I lied about where I lived and was silent otherwise. She was smoking. My heart was beating fast and hard. The seats were old cracky leather and the floor had bare metal parts and there were a couple newspapers next to me. I rolled my window down and stared out. They got off the highway at Huron and I said I'd be fine at the gas station. And, I was. 

I had the weirdest reaction to the smell of a man yesterday. My initial feeling was determined confusion. Like I had to dissect the layers of what he smelled like to make sense of it. It was cinnamon gum, sweat, oil, outdoor air stuck to the skin. Pretty unpleasant to me. There was another smell that was darker. Moldy, and dirty. Damp. That was the layer that kicked in a memory I don't know if I ever even had. I was suddenly small, like five or six, and I was sitting with my knees pulled up to my chest on a cement floor in something like a barn, but with no animal smells. Maybe a garage, but commercial not residential. The edges of the peripheral vision are really smudged out. I'm hyper aware that I'm somewhere I shouldn't be with someone that wasn't meant to have me but I didn't have fear, there was logic about everything going on. I didn't have a sense that anyone was going to hurt me. I wasn't crying or talking. No one else was with me that I could see. The sounds of the memory(?) never came to the surface.