Midnights

Just before the day grew a coat of violets, your verbal bomb detonated and reduced the world to rubble. As I knocked dusting powder from my cardigan, I saw that he had colored all of my wreckage at least 21 shades of blue. "Cause you're just a man, it's just what you do, your head in your hands as you color me blue...", I hummed. You laughed your throaty laugh and said: "At night, all cats are dark blue. You'll get over it eventually. I never promised you a rose garden". I would have been happy with garden carnations, I said. No, I didn't say it, I thought it. "A rose garden! What am I saying? Mediterranean landscapes, exuding the scent of orange blossom, nights emerging from warm blue and satin sheets in indigo, that's exactly what you would have thought appropriate". You said it with a patronizing smirk, but you couldn't hide the fact that an icy blue veil had settled over your tonka bean-coloured eyes. I thought about how you can look at someone and yet not see them and considered introducing myself and putting myself right. Instead, I watched as the blue hour, tender as the petals of the iris, settled over the street and my thoughts and hoped it would never end.
You sat there with your sky-blue, worn mohair sweater and your "I just got out of bed" hair, aware with every fiber of your being that only ravishingly good-looking people can afford such carelessness. You took a drag on your cigarette and blew blue vapor over our heads. "You melancholic," you said, "blue is your favorite mood. It's so sentimental, so vanilla... Melancholy is the avoidance of pain, the repression of black." For the first time, I felt seen by you. I stood up, put on my jacket and your cigarette, stubbed it out and walked through the door. I hummed: "And now I do, I wanna move, out of the black, into the blue..."

*!****
"L'Heure Bleu" didn't want to let me put it into words, but send this story instead. I hope for your indulgence for the lack of fragrance description, fragrances sometimes have a mind of their own and prefer to hum narratives. Many thanks to Spatzl for this little blue pearl, which was intended to tell a melancholy story, but actually makes me very happy.

When you went away
Kiss-scarred skin
Ashy body parts, soiled by touch
Soundlessly formed letters on the lips
All that remained

A scenario of longing in three chapters. Waking up, still in the intermediate world between dream and reality, cautiously hopeful. Realizing that none of it was a dream. Perceiving the scent between rumpled sheets that is not your own and being pushed to the floor by the harsh realization that you have been left behind. Peeling yourself out of bed in a daze, stumbling over your own feet, searching for balance, only to find the last life raft a few steps further on the kitchen chair. Gaining time, procrastinating, smoking two cigarettes and letting the coffee get cold. Forming syllables with your lips, giving up letters of a name that can no longer be pronounced. Go to the bathroom, examine what is left of the self in the mirror. Mend the kiss scars in a makeshift way, look at the still glowing ashes on the skin, dissociated, where glowing touches have crumbled to dust. Go back to bed, press your face into the familiar pillow, wait. When a nothing left behind becomes an everything. At some point it will pass.
Oh yes, the fragrance: a small pinch of neroli, lots of oakmoss and patchouli, a sweet, humanizing base. Secondary matter. Fragrance-turned-fragile urgency, fueled by intimacy, longing, despair and the memory of the one spot on another neck where one's own face has always found refuge.

With longing thanks to the heart shooter @Jeob for this melancholy world in D minor. It should have been a statement, but didn't want to be limited to 1000 characters.

"No?!" he pearled sluggishly from her mouth. A cautious question mark in his intonation left some space and a pitifully hopeful gap open.

December 24th. What year? It had briefly slipped her mind. Did it even matter? When had she stopped counting the years? Instead of years, she collected desires, carefully lined up in unadorned boxes.
She pulled a strap of the dress over her shoulder, Dior from the year 2000, white silk chiffon printed with imaginary newspaper pages. It always seemed just right to her, but never fitting. "Isn't that a bit short?" he asked. She gave him a mild smile, refraining from commenting on other short things, and stepped into the as good as new satin stilettos with dizzying heels. An absurd decision with the snow flurries outside. The higher the heels, the better she could climb over obstacles, she thought to herself. Christmas Eve at his parents' house with a large family gathering, her mother and father also present, would bring many a hurdle with it.

She looked at him. He looked good. Always had been. His broad shoulders and athletic build bore witness to his rationality and discipline - two qualities that could be transferred from his physique to his character. They both had both feet on the ground, successfully balancing work and life as befitted their status (subject to the definition of success), the model couple with the harmonizing zodiac signs, the dream couple from their school days. Only the dream wedding had never happened. She told herself that their bond didn't need to be notarized. Sometimes, secretly, she wondered whether she didn't actually need this illusion of freedom, of being able to leave her life at any time without having to testify. At these moments, she flinched briefly and shook herself as one shakes oneself to get rid of an obsessive thought. Knocking on wood three times and briefly moving her head back and forth.
She didn't care about ticking clocks. The only timekeeping she was interested in was the Rolex on her wrist. Those around her, on the other hand, seemed much more preoccupied with expiration dates and procreation rates.

She put on her perfume. The scent of jasmine, tuberose and orange blossom flooded the room and mingled with that of her honey-blonde hair. But there was something else, something tropical, sultry, a damp film on her skin that elicited a longing like a soft sigh. It drew her somewhere, without precise coordinates or destination. It made the barely visible hairs on her arm flicker, as if something buried deep inside her, half human, half animal, was sending her little signals. A sweaty veil of jasmine also drifted towards her from the next room. He rarely wore that scent, something from Dior, some man's name she couldn't think of at the moment. She didn't think his scent was appropriate for the upcoming occasion. Too much testosterone.

The entrance to his parents' house smelled of tangerines. If it hadn't been the depths of winter, she could have sworn currants were tickling her nose. What was wrong with her? There it was again, that dark thing, impossible to grasp, impossible to put into words, the uninvited guest who only drops in for a moment but leaves behind a lasting veil of unease. His mother's voice tore her from her thoughts: "My dear, you're naked, not even a pair of tights?" She tasted the bitter note despite the sugar coating disguised as worry. Another comment she only wanted to smile mildly at today. His father said he liked it, gave her a complicit wink and took the snow-white cashmere coat from her.

This was followed by kisses, hugs, uncles and great-aunts and the scent of those fur coats that you could only wear at a certain age without risking a color attack. Champagne made resinous conversations flow more smoothly. She, on the other hand, drank red wine, ignoring her mother's disapproving looks. One awkward movement from his sister, who was about to open a bottle of champagne, and a river of red made its way down the newspaper pages of her dress. She had to laugh and thought to herself, finally, finally the dress has been deflowered. Always just right, never fitting. Someone had handed her a cloth to wipe up what she needed before the river could reach her stilettos. Suddenly, she noticed how it became quiet around her. Confused, she looked around and saw him behind her, solemn face tense with expectation, on his left knee as he should be. The question echoed in the room without fully reaching her ears. Moved faces and hands clasped together in front of their mouths.

"No?!" he pearled lazily from her mouth. A cautious question mark in his intonation left some space and a pitifully hopeful gap open. At that moment, the cork of the champagne bottle, which his sister had been fiddling with for some time, popped, probably not expecting this answer. The sound of air being drawn in and all emotion fading from her eyes filled in all the empty spaces. She laughed harshly: "No, I don't want to!" She wanted to add a quick "I'm sorry", but the moment seemed inappropriate for a lie. Instead, she said resolutely and with a serious face: "No, I don't want to, I have to go, thank you for the party!" And she meant it sincerely.

It was snowing softly outside. The silence contrasted with the deluge behind her, the roar of which only became more muffled with every step and at some point could no longer be felt. She, the white snow queen with the scarlet stain on her dress, stomped precisely in her stilettos over the cotton-soft carpet. A car pulled up next to her. "To the station," the driver nodded and she got in. "You must live in a different climate zone," said the aging gentleman. "Not yet," she whispered more to herself than to him.

At the station, she picked up a small suitcase that had been waiting for her in the locker for who knows how long. Sidling lightly between the partly lustful, partly contemptuous glances of the few passengers, she boarded the train and sat down in an empty four-person compartment. The announcement announced that the next stop was the airport. An attractive, if somewhat young, man with sparkling eyes, black as labdanum, asked if the seat next to her was free. "Not this year, my dear, not this year!" She laughed uproariously, sounding hysterical to his ears. He moved away, shaking his head. She smiled and said to herself, "Maybe Casablanca". The barely visible hairs on her arm began to flicker.

"Nothing unusual, nothing strange
Close to nothing at all
The same old scenario, the same old rain
And there's no explosions here
Then something unusual, something strange
Comes from nothing at all
I saw a spaceship fly by your window
Did you see it disappear?"
("Amie", Damien Rice)

HE
Most days, life was good. The embers still crackled quietly, unexcited rather than passionate, between wooden coffers on the walls, beige sofa, clear, respectful glances and self-evident touches. Whether this was a fulfilled life or the well-tempered sum of fulfilled desires was a question he did not want to ask aloud or to himself. Longing was only a trickle now. Some days, however, this trickle swelled and became a river. Leaving his bed within minutes, it could flood everything that had not been stowed away at mind level or mindfully enough in the emotional safe. Like today. He's not home alone, but something has turned the trickle into raging waters within seconds. He goes into the garage and takes out the cardboard box labeled "Unterlagen Elternhaus" from the far corner. A small stack, seven or eight photos, shamefully hidden between two long since insignificant cadastral extracts.
A green Fiat Cinquecento, she stands next to it, reddish-blond hair and a laugh that would hold at least the happiness of two lives. The strap of her tank top has slipped, she carries bergamots and lemons in her right arm and has converted the lower part of her top into a catch basin for the fruit with her left hand. Her belly button flashes out, she is unaware of herself and her effect at this moment. How much happiness in life can fit in one photograph? How big are great loves? Or are they only so big (yes, present tense) because they never found their fulfillment and still hovered in the limbo of promises made in prospect but never kept? He thinks of the roses he had given her that day, how they filled the cottage with its east-facing windows with their fragrance. And he remembers how she wouldn't throw the roses away, even when they were almost faded and growling slightly animalistically.
The photo she took of him falls into his hands. Same year, different season, early winter. He had left the house with the excuse of needing to get some fresh air. The pre-Christmas scent of cloves and cinnamon still hung in his scarf. He had waited for her beside a fir tree, the tallest at the edge of the forest, his own after-shave, something with galbanum and patchouli, in his nose. When he embraced her, her neck smelled familiarly of vanilla, only hinted at, never room-filling. She had asked him a question weeks ago. He looked at her pleadingly and said "I can't." Breathed and resembling a feather, the words left his mouth. The feather became a knife blade coated with his words. At home, he blamed the red eyes on the cold.
A voice calls his name, hastily he puts the photos in the box and pushes them far back on the shelf. He will explain the reddened eyes today with the dust on the old boxes in the garage.

YOU
It was that time again. The familiar, ominous visit to the garage, supposedly looking for some relics in the old boxes. She is still in the kitchen, looking at the highest fir tree on the edge of the forest. She always knew there must be a trigger, only which one? She had just returned from the market, had put bergamots, lemons and a bouquet of fragrant roses on the table. An old Italian pop song was playing on the radio. She dismisses the question of why.
She's always been smart enough to quickly grasp what was playing. The sudden exuberance, the surprise visit of his parents in Italy, which he had to do partout alone. She was also confident enough to know that this thing would pass. Last but not least, she was blessed with enough self-respect to be aware not to play the game for too long. Then it sorted itself out just before Christmas. No one gets such red eyes from a little cold. She opens the window and calls out to him that lunch will be ready in 15 minutes, goes up the stairs to hang her coat in the closet. As she does so, she notices a box on the floor, a corner not properly covered by the long clothes. She kneels down and looks at the label: "Pictures and letters from Mom and Dad." Somewhere on the bottom of the box lies her bridge over the rivulet of longing. But not now, for now there's lunch.

One look had been enough. No detours, no questions about where who comes from and what who does, no comments about the weather and the never-ending drizzle. One look across the charmless bar, between colorless people who loosened their minds and tense necks with high-proof alcohol after work. A glance that had to part the dense air of damp jackets and not-so-freshly showered people with razor-sharp certainty before it reached its target. Now they stood wordlessly facing each other at the bar counter, defiantly withstanding each other's gaze, sipping their drinks. A big last sip, a decisive silent request, someone of them put on a trench coat, someone a waxed jacket, they left the bar.
They walked on the deserted street, staggered half a step behind each other, at least someone of them knew where to go. Walking side by side seemed too familiar to both of them.
The hasty search for the apartment key dragged on. The jasmine bush by the house entrance grinned frivolously knowing, the scent as detached and urgent as their intention.

Now they lay side by side in rumpled, mossy sheets that should have been changed days ago. The scent of the carnations on the dresser settled over their skin, mixing with the sweat. The roses seemed less amused, yet contrasted, if not caricatured, this obvious humanity too much their superiority. Resinous honey beads on their sweaty foreheads, exhausted and flushed, unclear whether from slowly ebbing arousal or from shame, they awkwardly avoided each other's gazes. What had they said? What had they shown of themselves? Who were these shadow people, who lowered themselves to the animal lowlands of humanity? Bitter sour discomfort. Because someone had witnessed their own shadow? Or had their own eyes seen something about them that they had relegated to a dark corner, like the sugar bowl that the neighbor had brought back from her vacation in Spain. Shadows like toddlers, believing that if they close their eyes, no one else can see them. It seemed so easy in the protective membranes of anonymity. Now that any of them remembered that the sand in the litter box desperately needed changing, the gap between their self-image and who they were 15 minutes ago seemed unbridgeable. Even the cat on the dresser looked at them disdainfully, seriously contemplating knocking over the vase of carnations. Breaking the vacuum, one of them stood them up, shook his head briefly with his eyes closed, turned to the other with a grin and asked, "Honey, so what are we playing next week?"