You are shuffling uncomfortably on the long wooden benches in the back of the synagogue, thirteen-or-so years old, in ill-fitting pants and the button-up shirt you saved for bar mitzvahs because your friend's mom once said you looked good in it. A few seats away, your classmates are snickering about something and an unknowably thin unease fills the small arteries on the outskirts of your heart. Your attention flashes between different things in the long boredom of these Saturday mornings: five minutes for the big colorful tapestries on the wall, of the burning bush and Joseph's brothers; ten minutes to flick through the thin pages of the bible, trying to find the funny stories where Onan is punished for jerking off; twenty minutes for the huge vaulted ceilings (demolished now), that bend and buckle in sharp chevron concrete towards the bimah, the altar where the Rabbi drolls through the same tired prayers.

Your friends occasionally get up to slip out the back of the hall, nominally to visit the bathroom– but no one needs to pee that much, and everyone knows it. This is the same pre-pubescent game that is played out every other Saturday as you cycle through your year's bar- and bat-mitzvahs; the quiet tingling in thirteen-year-old stomachs that something is up, you know?

You follow your friends out into the hallway, darting around and sneaking whispers to avoid the wrath of the old Polish lady in the leopard-print dress. Secretly you hope that maybe one of the girls would ask to kiss you, and that the rumor would spread of how cool you were. But you feel guilty about having crushes and guilty for skipping your friend's prayer service and guilty for being so awkward and a little bit chubby and bad at sport, so you slink back to the main hall, to bask dejectedly in the awkward voice-crack refrains of the thirteen-year-old half-singing this week's torah portion.

As you reflect on your current armpit-hair progress, the far away smell of kosher bagels and lox and capers drifts into the synagogue and a wave of skittish hunger subconsciously passes across the congregation. The fragrances mix with the scents of polished wood benches, decades old, forming whorls in the air, of bible dust and teenage angst. The deep scents filter through your blood and into the cavities of your brain, settling on your skin like an ashen dust that hardens into bark. Every other Saturday, you add a new layer of the fragrant wood, until the rings are inches thick, mottled and mapped with the whirlpools of puberty. At night, in your bedroom, you peel off little pieces, breathing deep and remembering. You crush it up into a fine powder and let it sift through the mesh of your fingers into the besamim box you keep under your bed for safekeeping.