Honeysuckle
In which I hunt for her
She smelled of honeysuckle, I think. The memory is faded now, a sort of fuzzy image, and I find myself grasping at senses like silk, to recreate her. Only I never can. Those five slippery strands always fail me.
What was her smell? I strain to remember. She had a soap that came in a blue wrapping and it left her skin with a certain scent and I curse my brain to tell me what it was. Most people would say a smell doesn’t matter. But maybe those folks haven’t lost a person before.
Lost a person. Did I lose her? How do you lose a person? Losing is different than death. It’s not as though she’s with the odd-sock matches or that one mechanical pencil from fourth grade. But no, of course, it’s a turn of phrase.
Death happens first. Losing happens later, when you will your mind to call up some part of a person and it refuses. It has deemed that thing, whatever it was, unnecessary to keep. It reuses those brain cells for a phone number or some other normal thing. And no matter how hard I try I can’t remember her goddamn smell.
I will myself to forget pieces of knowledge so that I may keep her instead, but of course, it just strengthens those connections. And it doesn’t bring me closer to her.
I may never get her smell back, nor her laugh or some small secret jokes we shared. It is another death to accept this.
But mourning is a sort of tribute, isn’t it? We steep ourselves in a person, hot tears and sweet memories brewing into cupfuls of things we must swallow to move on in our lives.
And the thing is, after that tempest, the rain will clear. I can walk outside again and collect new smells. I can brush my fingers along the leaves of plants as I walk, loosing drops of cold rain that have collected there. That rain which was once here on this earth, ascended to the sky, and traveled back down again — its own life and death cycle.
I wonder to myself, does the rain bear memory?
I’ll walk after every rainfall and connect myself back to each of these small thoughts and things that aren’t small at all. Precipitation will rise and fall until the end of time as it has for eons. We know this. Weathermen are soothsayers, in the end.
But I’ll tell you a secret: Honeysuckle grows the best after a good bout of rain.
And someday, I’ll be able to walk past a honeysuckle plant and bring her to my mind without the raw pain, just the faded, scarred over kind. I will tip the flute to my lips and taste its sweet nectar. I will bring petals to nose and inhale the smell and perhaps it will bring a flash of her, that olfactory combination that was hers alone. And I will smile knowing I’ve found her smell again.
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