A Scent For Feeling Things

 
I don't know if it's because in my late 40's, everything that felt recent and not so long ago now feels very far off, and everything that once looked 100 years away, now feels like it could happen tomorrow. I'm sad about this, and I'm sad about everything all the time. Very in my feelings, you could say. In honor of feeling my feelings, am wearing a BIG feeler from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab(autumn 2022) on both wrists this morning.

Pomegranate, Patchouli, Moss, & Fir Needle (that is what it is called and those are the notes) More an ambient murmur than a sonic scream of a pomegranate, it’s such a subtle red fruit, I can barely tell it’s red, or that it’s a fruit. I smell it faintly on my wrist, in the warmth of my skin, the throb of my pulse. It’s a heart healing itself, stitching itself back together in the small devotions of gentle fairy tales, favorite flowers, and pictures of baby Snoopy. Being kind to yourself when you get sad, and homesick for a home that doesn’t exist anymore. Allowing yourself to weep for someone else’s grief when you read for the 100th time the howling sorrow of Andrea Cohen’s poem “Refusal to Mourn.”

In lieu of
flowers, send
him back

Letting your heart feel all of it, so much of everything. Breaking it every day. Mending it forever. Hoping and dreaming and loving and doing it again and again and again and waking up in the morning with the sunrise and feeling and smelling that tiny throb at your wrist and knowing that it’s the only way any of this works. What else can we do?