This Uber driver the other day, saying, you know how, miss, and I hope to God I don't offend ya, but you know how over summer, you store your good winter clothes away, and when you take them out, they've got this sort of... smell. 'Cause you gotta wash 'em, and it's not big business if you don't, just. Others know, I guess. They pick up on it. Well, it was just what these two people smelled like, I swear to God, and it was forty minutes riding. I kept them windows open only just slivers, good old finger width, no more. I'm no arsehole or nothing, but that smell. That smell, miss, I swear I got it in my nostrils stills. Like it seeped into me somehow.
And yet, now, I sniff my stowaway tee-shirt, and all I get is old smoke. The last grill on the terrace. Those late night summer dinners, with the heat, with the last licks of sun still unbearable. Old smoke tee-shirts smell like love, and houses that are no longer ours. A quick sniff, and I'm transported right back, to all those things we loved once, and spied on, and admired. The sneaky talk like after-sex whisper-in-throat, inside that little pocket of personhood that's between the collarbone and the throat. That, but no sex. Or was it, maybe, lots of sex? Was I there? Am I now?
The smell of existing. Of rejection. Of being called 'miss' and accepting it's not quaint or confused. It's simply where I am now. Music that's too wishy-washy, songs that know me from the inside out. Ever wary of things which know me, wary still, after all these years. You don't believe me when I say, but why should it be so good now, but then, wasn't it so very bad all those years, and don't you remember?
Now I'm here, smelling like a flat I'll never walk into again. You win some, you lose some. Rejection on the coattails of great success. Small, round breasts, but aroused, also.
It's been a strange sort of little life. Of late. Has been late. And when I thought what's one thing I feel like most for Halloween, I thought it wouldn't be death, after all, not this time. It's not funny, playing fast and loose the way I was taught. I feel, increasingly, like I'm not around from here. Even as I talk the high talk of returning to the village's heart, myself, straying to the edges and the odd peripheries. A witch, a hex, some primeval kind of wanderer for the here and now.
Except, there's more to life, isn't there? Like this tee-shirt like old smoke and long goodbyes. And all them crazy things crowding, crowing, crowning at my future.
Who were you for Halloween? Then again, who are you now?
