Ca(ClO)2
Breathe to live; live to breathe
The chlorine smell ignites my forebrain.
Olfactory receptors fill; sensory waves coalesce into breakers, plunging me into an ocean of childhood. We adults scuttle our dry feet away from life's flow but seldom follow its ebb. Children aren't afraid to get their feet wet.
Now I invite immersion.
My olfactory bulb explodes with data, swamping my hippocampus, where memories had been documented, filed, and categorized decades ago. Smells entangle with wet feet slapping the pavement toward pool steps. The memory absorbs sounds of mayhem—cacophony—shrill-voiced ululations of pseudo-terrified exaltations.
Calcium oxychloride disassociates.
Unstable calcium and hypochlorite ions, freed by water, waft in with its characteristic smell. Like lining up the tumblers of the lock that is my limbic system, carefree childhood memories, unbridled, escape and devour my sensible, responsible adulthood, to relive my life lived as a cartoon.
My first cranial nerve, exchanging sodium for potassium, synapses: sodium ions enter and potassium ions leave, crossing the membrane whose voltage changes drastically.
By which…I remember.
More than that, I re-live. Re-am. All life's years collapse into a singularity of who I was, am, and will become.
The smell of chlorine, thereby, gatecrashes my amygdala, exploding with emotion. The route of propagated impulses is as short as it is direct. Calcium hypochlorite lifts me into an out-of-body experience of summer poolside horseplay, belly-busters, and face-splashing. And I can still smell each splash!
Fun has a smell.
Nerve conduction hijacks recollections, selectively rewriting my memoirs. Revised, they're etched in arrears, written—over the head of a childhood's ability to savor such moments at the time—in real time, by someone who can fully appreciate them now.
Poolside, I inhale deeply and taste my child, relive childhood snapshots, and find happiness under the lock and key of biochemistry.
My ancestors evolved for millennia, wrapping higher-order convolutions of gray matter around my primitive mind, gyri that hardly gyrate as mirthfully as the child who lies beneath, ready to laugh.
Ready to play.
I walk wet pavement; I slip, falling back, hitting my head.
"You better get that checked," someone says, concerned about concussions. Right, concussions.
That’s an adult concern.
My child gets snatched away, a passing train trails off in a Dopplered decrescendo. I re-enter adulthood, fretting whether or not I’ve paid my medical insurance premium this month.
Still smelling the chlorine and hearing the water sounds, I feel the overwhelming urge to … pee. In the pool. Oh, yeah!