sense/memory

I had taken a nap and then, awake, decided to take a shower. I had bought new soap, a different brand, and while in the shower the smell of that soap triggered a vivid, almost physical memory, of being back in college my first year, living among strangers in a strange place, with a roommate who spent hours talking on the phone in French and chain-smoking and who only listened to the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison and Bruce Springsteen, taking classes that felt over my head (even the music classes), trying to negotiate a social maze dominated by slick and sophisticated private-school kids while I, from a barely-above-white-trash small town in Pennsylvania, felt utterly alien to their whole scene...it was a time when I felt truly, utterly, and completely alone and lost and wanted so badly to run away. And when friends from home would call and ask "how's it going" I would tell them that it was going great and that I loved it and that it was the best place...All from a bar of blue soap...