Picture warmth. As something you’ve known your whole life; ferocious, like a friend, angry, like a father - warmth. The light blazing on your back. We tend to carry it with us, and miss it when it's gone. I looked for the best of it. The bit that feels like the first time you noticed this is a good blanket. Something gentler than heat and something sweeter than sweat; a glow, a hum, an invite someplace next to childhood.
I wore this perfume on the flight home in winter, the memory stored in this little see-through bottle. It cost nothing and smelled of seasalt the first time I inhaled.
I pictured the shells collected on my bedside, from sandy toed trips to the beach with curly headed girls and quiet drives with my sister. They sound like this smelled, and tasted the way the ocean does; like age, like time had gone by and there were conversations to be had, like it's too cold now or too hot to go back, like it had been a while and now all we had were the stones we picked up on the way home. I don't know where I put those. Our clothes rarely had pockets.
Something could have been baking in the next room. A promise was made, in tiny letters on a tiny bottle, of some oozing vanilla - some cottage daydream, freshly baked bread and something extra to stir into tea. Something could have been baking in the next room, I’d never know. Not a delicacy pieced together, no, something else; a misplacing of sugar and a replacement of hearty salt, a sweet treat made whole with kisses sent from the sea. Yes, the promise fell through, like friends and fathers sometimes tend to.
6/10, would not repurchase.
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