Perfume

[squirmelia]

She watched Perfume: The Story of a Murderer last night, which she found intriguing, even after having read the book. She arrived home and smelt a soft toy that belonged to her grandmother, to see if she could still smell her grandmother's scent on it. She wasn't sure if she could, since it smelt mostly dusty.

She wonders what other people would want to capture the scent of and thinks that sometimes it would be the way people smelt that they miss, of past lovers.

She stands by the postbox and sniffs it gently, trying to catch traces of love letters dowsed in perfume, hiding in the depths of the postbox, impatient to reach their destination. Instead, she smells only the metallic tang of the red postbox and does not even know if there are letters inside.

She wanders to Rose Road to see if it was named that because of the way it smells, but all she can smell is the butterfly bush, still in bloom. She adds the smell of roses to the street and imagines the pavements cracked with roses growing through them.

She thought about visiting Lime Street, Almond Road and Cherry Walk, but the sun had began to set. She ran towards the sun, chasing the sunset through the graveyard, but did not reach the vivid pink and orange stripes of colour before they disappeared.

Comments

[shlunk.livejournal.com]

i know there are least four or five smells that would make me think of former lives, former bodies: the smell of cheap gravy and drab sausages that inhabited a huge primary school i spent approximately two weeks at in 1983; the pot pourri in my mum's pillow as she waited to give birth to my brother; the washing powder my ex used, which i unfortunately smell on the tube at least once a week, and which thus unfortunately reminds me of my time with her; the satsuma i left in the metallic dustbin in my conservatory for a whole summer and autumn, to be discovered right before christmas 2005, just as our relationship began; the excess of throat-burning powder and perfumery my last flatmate used, daily, to cover the non-existent stench of her own nature (i wish she'd get in touch, truly); the slurrey that clouded the lungs when within a half-mile radius of any of several large, working farms in the vicinity of my childhood home - the stench of acceptance in little, little wales.