IV

This iteration contains: a tiny lesbian love story, the leavings of the wood, and sirens.

My fiancée is good at many things. She can build a cabinet from scratch, break a piece of storytelling down to the nails and fix it, give life-changing shoulder rubs, and pick out jewelry. But her greatest gift - also a curse, as all the chosen must cope with - is her sense of smell. It’s nearly a superpower. She’s incredibly sensitive to scents of all kinds, and as you can imagine, this has sometimes driven a rose-whiffed wedge into our relationship.

I am not dressed without perfume, or clean without a sugar scrub; my hair treatment is made with almond oils and my overnight moisturizer is suffused with flower petals. Opulence, to me, comes with the luxury of scent, and I can’t live without it.

So I play with all sorts of perfume samples, but when it comes to full bottle purchases, she and I have a consultation. If she’s neutral on a given scent, I usually reflect on how much I actually need another decanter cluttering up my vanity, but on the rare occasions she likes it, I buy it immediately. And it’s as a result of this careful process that I bring you Vilhelm Parfumerie, a house consistently given two thumbs up from my fiancée for its layered and buoyant fragrances.

For our first (definitely not our last) foray into its library, we’ll go with what I have on today:

Dear Polly, by Vilhelm Parfumerie

On first spray, I miss autumn so much I can nearly taste it. A burst of dark greenery that settles and solidifies into oak moss, reminding me of plucking handfuls off branches as I rode beneath them on horseback. The lichen left a close, crushed smell on my skin, just like this. Dear Polly is deeper than that though, steeped in black tea and the faint essence of chilly spice. That coolness can be a little menthol-y before the drydown, but it vanishes into cinnamon without much fuss. A perfume I’d love to catch on someone’s hair and neck as they hugged me.

Pair with: brown lipstick, a necklace bearing your silver-embellished initial, reading near the fireplace in a quiet hotel lobby, rain in Boston, rose-embroidered Doc Martens, shuffling through a carpet of fallen leaves with Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes No. 1 tripping through your headphones.

.

I’ve been thinking about Odysseus lately. I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it’s because I rewatched 2004’s wretched Troy last weekend, or because Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey finally arrived on my doorstep. Or maybe it’s because I got my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Tuesday.

(Ulysses and the Sirens, Harold Draper)

I’m half protected. And even when I’m fully vaccinated, there’s still uncertainty: new strains and the unknown status of carriers. After such a long and awful year, to be so close, and to still have to lash myself in place; the post-pandemic world is such a beguiling concept, after all, and we all want to make our way towards it as soon as possible. But home won’t be the same. It won’t be gone, but it will be irrevocably changed, fault lines exposed and ties of love made even more binding.

I’m ready to walk through my city again, changed, but still be recognized. I want to run the interlopers out of my hall. I want to be married. We just have to weather the hungry sea a little bit longer.