Mizunara Parfum Satori 2018

And once again, I'm dreaming.
Dreaming myself into that long-awaited scent that has become longing itself.
Longing for what? For departure.

Yet at first I didn't want to dream at all.
Wide awake, the cloudy wet hits my skin.
In the intrusive light of an early afternoon, reminiscent of throat scratching.
Half-clear in my head: inhale.
And while still standing in the world, in the tidy room, the pillow spreads.
It's a lavender-filled one, and I think, "Heavens, no! I don't want to, I do want to stay awake!"
But too late, the familiar dry-bourgeois scent numbs my senses, I sink onto its purple linen cover with fluttering eyelids and fall deep.

Through layers, into shafts whose stories I never knew.
Into the depths that seemed to call me.
The crisp lavender capsules were but the lure, the cheese in the mousetrap.
So I fall.
Into sleep and dreams whose self-spinning thread is made of scent.
Slowly the grandmotherly projecting lure softens, its scent no longer toothless and heavy-eyed, it becomes cool and dew wetted.

I crouch in the blackest corner of a dark vault, barely a ray of light reaches here, it smells a bit like a coal cellar and fresh mud.
Wiry, wolf-sized figures with fox-like tails cavort in the middle of this hazy place, licking the sweet dew off the lavender heads and making choppy excited noises as they do so. Their rude sounds have the dirtiness of sweating labdanum, and as their tongues plane over the knee-high lavender it transforms into many hundreds of cypress trees, their decorous statures disappearing into the nothingness of the ceilingless height.
Their tart woody aroma pulls up the corners of my mouth despite a wildly beating heart.
The figures, however, do not seem at all pleased at this miraculous termination of their dewdrop orgy.
Now, willing to know who brought about this spell, they toss their faceless heads about, and though I make myself as small as a mimosa dancing a tango, first one, then two, then all glances are directed at me.
Violet-leaf-rough panic scrapes my inner walls and as the figures move toward me as if in a trance, I notice that the cypress trees are not only growing upward, but downward as well. Wherever there is a tree and roots should normally be massaging the ground, the feathery growth stretches as if on axis into further shallows of space.
So I lurch remotely to the cypress nearest me and plunge into the outlined hole in the ground through which its twin reaches down.

Again I fall, and where a moment ago it smelled of beastly breath, gloomy visions, and lapsed organics, now the foreboding of pure air reveals itself.
I had quite forgotten to breathe, but now, as it brightens through my closed skin, a midnight-blue bliss makes its way up my nose and a sudden surge of oceanic wildness washes through me and shrieks at me, almost waking me up.

Landing in the wet element.
Indeed, it has taken me to the deepest depths of the overworld seas.
But here there is no darkness on the bottom, on the contrary, chalky white is the water and so excitingly fragrant that my gills greedily suck themselves full.
Metallic, waxy, effervescent, rippling, creaking, green-stalked.
A whale, barely larger than a seahorse, brushes my leg, swims past me without a greeting, and excretes a poppy-seed-like grain.
Knowing what to do, I float as close to the tiny creature as I can see its uneven, shimmering surface, then swallow it down with a large load of salt water.

There is darkness inside me.
Incorporated and sunken in the black vault, it is difficult to scrape out.
Yet within me it begins to flicker.
The flickering of the tiny lump becomes a soft glow, first questioning, then more definite, until it begins to glow warmly and my body wants to dissolve in its piercing light and the heated, radiant water that surrounds it all.

Thus filled and enveloped, I fall.
Upwards.
Into the harsh density of tree needles,
into the pale light of the sea mist,
into the soft nothingness of awakening.