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

[mikej-uk.livejournal.com]

I think it'd be better if the Flowers Estate smelled of flowers :)

[laslandes.livejournal.com]

Yay a Sotonite gag :)

Actually, re. the connection between smells and memories, maybe it's best that we can't hold onto these things. I remember the film Strange Days, which shows how an ability to record and relive experiences leads the Ralph Fiennes character astray.

Angela Bassett has the rather wise line in it: 'Memories fade. They are made that way for a reason...'

[the-elyan.livejournal.com]

The chances of the Flower Roads smelling of flowers, from my memories of them, are pretty slim.

Actually, if the world worked that way, people would be even less willing to go into the Cowherds than they are now...

BTW - re an earlier message, the Hockney exhibition is cracking, and I thoroughly recommend seeing it if you get the chance...

[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.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I think it would too! I lived there for a year, but cannot remember what it smelt of. Certainly not flowers, anyway.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I think I read Perfume after you suggested it to me?

I suppose it is indeed best that we cannot hang onto these things, since then if we do get to smell them again, it makes it so much better. (I'm thinking of strawberry fields.)

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Rose Road was actually somewhere else, a stray flowery road name.

Hockney, hmm, maybe I should go at the weekend, since I'm planning to be in London.

[criesbella.livejournal.com]

:) x

[laslandes.livejournal.com]

Really? Funny, I never did finish it myself... :)

It's a good point you make, if we can enjoy the thing either just for itself or with only positive associations. I fear it may be a glass full/empty type dilemma. I tend to get overly sad sometimes about the fact that life is finite and brief, which means anything that is redolent of past times has a certain bittersweetness to it.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it was someone else then!

Do you feel sad as the things are happening though?

[laslandes.livejournal.com]

Thankfully not...it's more a sense of loss when you remember acutely what something felt like that you had long forgotten about, even if (perhaps especially if) it was something happy.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

True. :(