fixative

fixative

I'm not much of a sycophant, which is a shame, because people deserve compliments, no matter how insincere. Which is why I always had such a hard time with praise from my first official soul mate, because her good intentions hardly trumped my distorted reality. That, and the fact that our ill-timed meeting could only best be described as a blessing in disguise, but disguised, nevertheless, as a hateful, bloody vendetta.

Fortunately, this was years ago, and in the time since I’ve learned that all she needed to hear from me was that I believed she was lovely and wild and backed into a corner far, far too soon. And how nice we would have been together, an affirmation of that counterintuitive truth that dreams actually get bigger as you get older and wiser. The young and naïve just don’t have the vocabulary to imagine horizonless vistas.

Unfortunately, I never actually told her.

Instead, I tried to describe, scrawled onto a cocktail napkin, the experience of her on my body, stuck in the same room with her, eight conference hours at a stretch, hands above the table, eyes on the prize. The closest I came was remembering a night on the lake, mosquitoes so engorged on our limbs that they were forced to walk back to whencever they might have come.

Back in my room, I scratched the bite, and for an impossibly brief moment, immediately following the lifting of my fingernail, and immediately before the return of the itch, I recognized that sensation. That. That perfectly wonderful feeling of satisfaction and relief, invisibly masked in dread. Bottle that moment, add to it a faint scent of jasmine, then bind it to a fixative of ambergris, spread it over your collarbone, dab your wrists and lie down beneath a slowly rotating ceiling fan with an hour’s light remaining, and right before you fall asleep, that will always be her name to me.