Edda32

I was in the wrong place at the wrong time when I didn’t meet you, and now I can only place my heart in a time capsule. A good day for it, this crystal-clear spring morning. Birds throw small notes into the world that burst unheard in the sky, the milk-white villas at the edge of the forest are asleep, no one dreams of a better life.
My heart beats under glass and under the gentle, metallic mist of the morning, which mixes with the bitter, fresh breath of the tea I haven’t drunk. And putting on my jacket, zipping it up, shoes, laces. A person with a sleeping heart can dress alone. Some wonders are small.
The dormitory of delicate dog violets blinks, snuggled in two past Octobers, Novembers, and their densely written leaves in tiny letters, now mace-brown and brittle, a sepia photo.
But I haven’t forgotten a word, and all the letters rustle and whisper under my steps and under my hands as I push them aside. The earth is heavy black rich, an inverted universe into which I can place my heart. The bitter dark green of the leaves and leaves and leaves protects eternity. Da capo, al fine, my heartbeat.
All the stars are waiting for you.

The brittle scent of overripe
folios in salt-patinated wooden shelves
As you, barefoot on the bow wave, rustling leaves
Break needles over sun-baked earth
Dream-walk.

Here a narrow cone of heat
Makes glaring dust shatter
And the eternal antiquarian holds
(Sunken in a fourth dimension)
In the ochre-stained furrows of his hands

A snow-glimmering cup
Filled with sun, pours the bronze-toned light
All over you.
And on burnt clay
The plum blossoms tenderly melt.

"This year I am giving all my friends their favorite fragrance, in one way or another."
I made this resolution, full of inspiration, freshly registered at Parfumo in the spring. In April, it was my older friend B.'s turn. An unobtrusive interview, questions about her scent preferences. Oh no! A Joop! I hate Joop! fragrances. My early teenage trauma must still run deep. A friend told me back then that designer Wolfgang Joop was 'such a handsome man'.
Being generally interested in handsome men, I took a look at Gala while at the dentist. The friend was right! (Hey, it was the early nineties, my estrogen levels were still so low.....) I planned to take a trip to Berlin after getting my braces off (or 'the fall' haha) and then to ride off with Wolfgang on the Quadriga, somewhere south, accompanied by my dazzling smile.
In the next session at the orthodontist, I learned from the same magazine that Joop was now gay. (The ride on the Quadriga was fulfilled much later in a different way, but that's another story and should be told another time.)
Anyway, the news burned a no-entry sign into my scent center, and my inner teenager still refuses to appreciate Joop fragrances with crossed arms.

But for friend B, the favorite fragrance had to be found. Well, I consulted eBay, found a dreadful post-yellow bottle (what's that???) a mini. Scent sn... auctioned. At home, I cautiously tested it. (B., I was allowed to do that!)
- Quelle surprise!
This is such a friendly, bright, warm scent! Wolfgang?! Is that you? The top note gently shakes hands, freshly showered, and hands over a Martini Bianco with lemon and lime. I can smell the carnations from here.
The glasses clink, people chat, no one speaks with a Berlin accent. I think I am in Hanover. Small talk flows, no one stumbles, no one falls out of character. The blonde beauty across from me sits, Wolferl and I have the same orthodontist, everyone is so nice. Now canapés.
I shed the etiquette and only fish the fruit from the snacks. Peaches, plums. This melt! It can only be canned fruit! (I check my braces in the reflection of a knife, everything is going perfectly) No one talks about politics, everyone is happy.
Before I get bored, I turn to the pretty flower bouquets. (Wolfgang said he would buy the flowers himself.) The bouquets have shoulder pads. Everything is so lush! Everything is so fresh! Heliotrope spreads in a trapezoidal yellow glass vase (what's that???) along with lily of the valley, dwarf irises, and even a few tuberoses hiding away, a little rose smiles here and there, a wild mix. The bouquets are world citizens. Wolfgang has tennis elbow. I nod understandingly. The sun is shining.

Wow, and how the sun is shining now! The host sheds his cream-colored jacket. I suppress the urge to stroke the silky satin cuffs. My gaze falls on two damp spots. Am I imagining it, or do I smell something?
Wolfgang makes a charming remark about my braces, I link arms with him. We walk over to the shade-giving trees. A waiter in white (Jorge, salsa teacher in the evenings) dances by. Even they are well-dressed here. His bicep holds the tray. Wolfgang's gaze wanders tray-downward to the south, mine does too. I take a dessert. Oh, a mousse of panna cotta! Delicious with vanilla and tonka. The sun is setting. David Hasselhoff and Rudolf Schenker toast each other. Like brothers. Someone is dancing.

(At home, I rip the outfit off, wash the scent off, and turn on Rio Reiser. 'The dream is over!'.....
But my friend doesn’t know that. She is just as nice and friendly and honest and gentle and yet sophisticated and elegant and witty, has a doctorate and at least four foreign languages, dances ballet..... The scent suits her so well! And I find it really good, just not for me.)

When you wake up and somehow sensed it, but didn’t want to accept in your higher consciousness that the hot dream of summer is over.
As always, the morning sun streams through your window, brushing against tea-yellow walls, and your gaze wanders barefoot over shadows. Bright shadows and dark shadows and the mountains and valleys of your bedspread. It finds a hold on a rusty heart, above the ancient, worm-eaten doorframe. That then becomes a thousand and one exits for you.
Your hands could still caress, cradling a warm dream, the rough linen, delicately cool fabric folds. Get up!
See the plum-blue heather, summer-forgotten, still juicy blackberry vines. Over everything, quietly, floating white cobweb fragments have settled. What dreamlike struggle took place here.

Walk through the misty curtains of the allotment garden! Feathered asters, self-glowing coneflowers, delicately branched anemones in white nightgowns lean longingly against fences and do not awaken from the crunching of your steps. This is an old man’s dream of someone who once spoke libido, an Afro-Asian language. Ethiopia. Oh girl, how hot it was back then! Spade, now carefully stored under the eaves. You’ve known this word since yesterday.

On the other hand, you see dew-damp, metallic plums in the silvery grass. Their yellow, juicy sweet wounds reveal to you the last secret of their aroma. Take it home! Unfold it here, in the whistling kettle of your inner morning. You have forgotten its singing, be a guest at the court of the wren! The bed is still warm.
You left without breakfast. An early riser’s absolute asceticism. That you drink all this, thus coolness and clarity and freshness and gently warm radiation of the whispering autumn sun. Your freckles are the stars of the past night.

How beautifully you had arranged the branches, the Milky Way of the jasmine wheels carried you away so cosmically. I called and called.

But now eat and drink! Tea and toast and bittersweetness. Autumn is the memory of summer and in its presence you incense reverently the coming winter.

The sea crashed against the hot sand, rolling in and receding, rolling in and receding, repeating in millions of years of pulsating indifference. I had sat here for one, two, or more hours, hardly remembering how I got here, coming here often. Often or too often, often or too often. My head felt numb and the astringent acidity of the little red wine I shouldn’t have drunk clung to my teeth, because I rarely drink. Perhaps I had fallen asleep.
I raised my hand to shield my eyes from the sun. My bangles clinked, but the sea knew nothing of it. I could smell the familiar sweetness of my sun-warmed skin, mingling with the salty wind, saw the memory of a childhood tan, but felt no touch and heard no echo.
The beach was completely empty, linen white, stretching all-encompassingly before my field of vision, inseparably sewn to the sky-blue void. I was nothing but a dot in an all-powerful continuum of heat and spray, my eyes a hollow mirror for a sightless reflection. A numbing apathy overcame me, covered me like a sand-white blanket. The sea would not stop crashing, not for me and for no one. Trapped in a cosmic hourglass, I stood there.

Only now did I notice a skinny, scruffy black dog, apparently here without a master. The dog had entered my horizon on the left, running oddly with a hop along the edge of the sea, its nose always to the ground. With a slight shudder, I saw that the dog was missing its right hind leg. What it was searching for in the fly-infested, rotting seaweed, I did not know, but in its tirelessness, it resembled no less the waves it sniffed.

I stood there, arm raised, the edge of my hand against my brow. What my eyes shared with the relentless light of a white afternoon sun was not a moment, much less a pause, but a forgetting. A being forgotten. A having been forgotten. I was overcome by the feeling that I had gotten lost in a longed-for solitude, that not even desire could bring me back, that the sun and the sea had forgotten me as I had fallen into their mirror, that I would dissolve or had already dissolved into light and water.
I stood and fell.
The sea and the light and the stones, the fragments of shells and sepia shells, the blistered seaweed and beach grass, the wretched black dog and I, everything spun, lost its fixed point, yielding the endless mosaic of an entropic eternity. And the unwavering ebb and flow of the sea did not care about me.
Suddenly, the shrill cry of a seagull drove a blinding anchor of fear between the waves of my heartbeat, splitting my here and now.

I ran. Back to the dune, feeling the hard resistance of the sand beneath my feet, dry blades and shell fragments digging into my soles. I ran. Back into the macchia, back into the spicy embrace of the defensive macchia, which opposed everything to the sun and the sea, with its thorny bushes, the wild salty, juicy-less blackberries, the shade of the kermes oak and the wind-swept, resinous pines, the numbing-spicy juniper, the nodding immortelles, the sweetly sticky cistus, and the wild thyme. And everything was chirping, was buzzing, was scent. Breathlessly, I inhaled this scent, the macchia was my chapel and its fragrance the heavenly incense.
Finally, I regained my heartbeat, which had left the uniform rhythm of the sea. Wild as the scent of the macchia, it had returned its own pulse to the waves, which now beat hard against my ribs and forced me to sit down.
The rocks of the macchia had gathered the heat of the day and passed it on to me hot as the hands of a lover. I ran my hands over my sweat-drenched face.

When I looked up, I saw into the bloodshot eyes of the black dog that had settled panting before me, mangy and scruffy and masterless. I tried to avoid its gaze, but the darkness of its eyes caught me, and I saw my own face in two black, shiny mirrors. And the golden-yellow, resinous sun poured thickly, slowly and clumsily dripping over us and enclosed us both.
**

Longevity and sillage are top-notch. :)


People, this is such a beautiful scent. It couldn't be otherwise. But I hope the text evokes the right associations.