I've got a perfume that smells like jasmine and resides in a bottle that looks like the tail-end of a sunset on a clear night. When you spray it it sounds like a miniscule spritz of the ocean whizzing over your head and, if you accidentally catch a taste of it, it's reminiscent of herbs that've been warmed near a fireplace.
That's how it was to me before, anyway.
Now it smells heavy like one hundred fifteen degree heat waves and damp like like misted towels shoved into a freezer - the practical man's air conditioning, as it were. It hangs in the air like the lingering scent of fireworks on the fifth of July and then shoots through it, leaving a trail of peroxide drippings and the strange, nearly undetectable scent of stitches. It looks pink and black and white, and then like luxurious shirts and grand mansions, and then like DNR papers.
It sounds like Frank Sinatra covers and looks like two clueless, blundering people trying to fight their way through something that was never meant to be fought through. It tastes like water after your twelfth or thirteenth or twentieth glass and like french fries the second time around. It sounds like your voice at four in the morning and the deafening silence afterwards. It feels like tears pooling in the sharp indentations above my clavicle and drying into thin, winding paths down my neck.
It smells and looks and tastes like us, and whenever I work up the nerve to smell it again it rips me open from the inside out - everything hurts and nothing feels right.
If I close my eyes at any given moment in its presence, I'm taken back to a myriad of our shared snippets of time, drifting off on the scent of the earthy perfume in the red bottle on my desk.
