A smell can bind a memory to the walls of the mind and heart. Mine takes me to a coffee plantation in the Papua New Guinea highlands, and to a fragile isolation that taught a child how to stay open to everything that came after.
Sweet, then sharp, and I am already gone.
The scent of the coffee flower, and underneath it the taste of the cherries, and it pulls me, every time, straight to the Big House garden. I am eight years old in the Wahgi Valley and none of the rest of my life has happened yet. I don’t choose the memory. It arrives on its own, the moment the smell finds me, in a café, in a hothouse, in a single sentence on a page. A scent can do that. It can bind a memory to the walls of the mind and heart so completely that the body goes back before you have decided anything.
I have spent a long time trying to understand why that smell does what it does. I think I finally have it.
Coffee blossom lasts a day or two. It comes out white and jasmine-heavy after the rain, the whole hillside goes bright with it, and then it drops. The plant builds that scent in order to lose it. The cherry comes later, sweet with that sharp edge on the tongue, and the cherry is what the work is really for. But the flower is the announcement, and it is gone almost as soon as it opens.
So the smell that holds my whole sense of who I am comes from a flower built to disappear.
I did not invent that. It is simply true, and it sits on top of everything I have ever cared about.
We were isolated out there. From outside, that sounds like a hardship. Remote, cut off, a child on a coffee plantation in the highlands, far from a country I was supposedly from, not quite belonging to the one I was standing in. There is a name for this. The third-culture child. Caught in the between, no native ground, building a self out of two places at once and getting it wrong in both.
The anxiety in that is real, and I will not pretend it away. There is a specific pang that never fully leaves a child raised like this. A low hum underneath everything. The constant quiet question of how to be in a place, when everyone around you seems to have been handed the instructions and you were not.
But here is the part that surprised me, and that I have stopped apologising for.
I felt that fragile isolation as a comfort.
The reason is almost stupidly simple. In that garden there was only one world. No competing way to be. No second room I should have been in. No other child doing it correctly while I failed to match. From outside, that isolation looks like deprivation. Inside the garden, it was the opposite. It asked nothing of me. There was nothing to get wrong. There was only the garden, the smell, the green pressing in, and me inside it. I did not have to know how to be. I just was.
And because I did not have to defend any fixed idea of myself, I could stay open. Soft. A child in that garden had no reason to brace against the world, and so I met it without armour. That openness is the thing I have carried furthest, and it is the thing I most want to name here, because the culture I live in now treats it as a weakness to outgrow.
We are told to arrive, and to arrive quickly. Know yourself. Find your voice. Close the gap before anyone notices it. We have decided that not-knowing is a failure of nerve, and that vulnerability is something to manage rather than something to keep.
I think that is backwards.
Vulnerability was the gift. Being a child with no fixed script, open and unguarded in a single quiet world, is exactly what taught me to walk into an unfamiliar place and stay open instead of bracing. A new country. A room where I do not understand the rules. A challenge with no map and no one to ask. The pang still comes. It is the same one from the garden. But underneath it now there is the other thing, a depth of confidence that was built in the one place I was the only author of a self, and so could not author it wrong. The openness did not leave me exposed. It left me able to learn the next place, the next room, the next version of who I might become.
I think of Agnes Martin walking out to the desert and staying there. From outside it looked like she was giving something up. She wasn’t. Out there, with nothing to measure herself against, she could finally hear herself. She found in the desert what I was handed in the highlands. We arrive at the same room through different doors.
I cannot summon any of it on command. I have tried. The confidence does not answer to want. The only thing that opens the door is that singular feeling, sweet then sharp, the flower built to disappear doing the one thing it was never made for, which is to stay. A whole self, bound to the walls of the mind and heart by something that lasts a day or two.
I have made my peace with not holding the key. The garden gave me what it gave me and then let me go, the way the flower lets go of the hillside. What stayed is not the place. It is the lesson the place taught a child too young to know he was learning it.
You do not need to know how to be in order to be. You only need to stay open long enough to find out.
So I will ask you what the smell asks me, every time, without warning. What place made you before you understood you were being made? What do you keep trying to return to, and which door still opens onto it? And when the next unknown arrives, as it will, will you brace against it, or will you stay soft enough to let it change you?
CW
Filed · The Journal · Art & Culture · PNG · June 2026
5°43′S 144°15′E · Wahgi Valley, Papua New Guinea