Since I read about “smell maps” of cities, my nose has been on high alert, like a dog at an airport. A designer named Kate McLean wants to record this fleeting information in order to see how cities change; she worries that, with all the air fresheners and bleach, cities today are “in danger of losing their distinctive stinks”. Rather than mapping the smells of a city, though, I find I’m mapping the smells of a life, evocative of far more than just vinegar and petrol. Smells are powerful, especially when, say, you’ve moved back to the place where you grew up, and are smelling the smells of a suburban childhood through newly cynical nostrils. The day starts just before seven.

The smell of your bedroom, having walked back in. For a second, the smell of a dark bedroom you’ve just re-entered with its shadow of breath is a foreign thing, and it’s as if you’ve stumbled into a stranger’s relationship, one you can see in its entirety from the door – a whole grown-up family, lit by the crack in the curtains.

The smell of your two-year-old’s bedroom. Hers is the only duvet cover that always smells of fabric softener, which means it makes you think of guilt. In the same way Body Shop dewberry body spray, a cloud of which filled Year Eight’s locker rooms to mask the smell of feet, came to trigger in you the same retchy disgust as sweaty feet themselves, the smell of fabric softener on a tiny duvet is now synonymous with the smell of everything you try and muffle. Your lack of domestic skills, daily bribery with chocolate, the number of favours you’ve received from your parents, each scrawled on the inside of your skull like cave paintings.

The air before it rains smells electric but sinister, which is probably what the internet smells like

Angel perfume on the tube. Perfume is meant to smell different on everybody, yet Angel always smells the same, a raw cake-mix of a scent, but left in the sun beside the rat it’s poisoned. The perfume echoes in your throat reminding you of awful journeys, like the time a couple of months ago when you were standing here, feeling ill. You asked a man, quietly, if you could have his seat as you were feeling odd. He said no. Which you really weren’t expecting, and it was probably partly that which made you faint into the arms of a very kind woman, who helped you off the train and didn’t even flinch when you started vomiting into a Tesco bag.

Hot bagels. Nobody told you to disguise your religion growing up, but you’d only admit it with a muted kind of shame. You didn’t want people to assume you were wealthy, or different in the wrong way. Later, you didn’t want them to assume you supported Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, or that you believed in God. Then your partner started a business which had the word “Jewish” in its name – they made bagels. The casual anti-semitism he occasionally received was a sort of relief, as if you’d been right to smudge over the details of your Ashkenazi ancestry. But, of course, you were older now, more anchored and peaceful, so it didn’t take much for you to question that embarrassing embarrassment. It took Ken Livingstone, and a huge rise in anti-semitism, and Trump responding to questions about it by attacking the reporter, and the smell of hot bagels, for you to embrace your Jewishness. Because they taste amazing, and remind you there’s joy there.

The air before it rains. It smells of pennies, a metallic warmth to the afternoon that means you hurry back inside to your computer. It feels electric but sinister, which is probably why this is what you imagine the internet smells like. This week, everybody on the internet knew exactly what they thought about Syrian airstrikes before they’d even got out of bed. Everybody at the pub knew the unpublished details of Trump’s romance with Russia, and everybody your friend went to university with had posted Twitter threads about foreign policy, many starting with the chilling threat, “1 of 23”. This is the smell of you knowing nothing. It’s surprisingly sweet. By mapping the smells of a day, of a life, you capture the distinctive stink of a truth beneath the chatter, and the distracting lights.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman