BINARY, an anthology. Chapter: Prada Black. You can find all other works of mine here. NOTES: This is a series I’m starting about my personal life. Some of these things deal with implied rape, gender, sexuality, and abuse. This piece is no exception. Please read knowing both that this is my real life I am allowing on display, and also that it may have upsetting content. This piece is safe!
When I was little, every summer we would plant a small garden in the backyard. I don’t remember the particulars of most of the garden--that was lost on me--but what I do recall was that, when planting season came around, my mother drove plastic garden stakes into the earth like a teepee. Next came the morning glories.
And they were magnificent. The enclosure was too small for the adults, so I would slip in with a book. I don’t remember the smell. All I have is a vague sense of earth and rustling leaves and the memory of sweetness surrounding me. I spent hours dreaming and reading and considering the world around me. I thought about manners and fairytales and tea parties.
Mostly, I thought about love.
I don’t know where I latched on to the concept. It certainly wasn’t from my parents. Their eventual divorce felt inevitable even in the early years. I knew--knew, even as a child!--that they did not love each other. My father’s parents were little better (though when my grandmother got her own separation at the age of eighty-eight, that was a touch more surprising). If anything, it was my mother’s family that contributed to my fantasies. My Mimi and Poppop have been together since they were teenagers, both endlessly, lovingly frustrated by each other, forever laughing over card games and movie dates.
But I don’t think they were the spark. My imaginary romances were of a different kind. They were slower, harder, less easily won. Yes, I wanted to believe in love at first sight. Somehow I never did. I carried those flower-scented dreams with me, close to my chest, fluttery and full-bloom and battering at my ribcage. I wondered if that was what love smelled like.
But things die.
One of my best friends tells me that I fall for anyone who shows me kindness, and God damnit if she isn’t right. There lies a path to heartbreak. People lie. People pretend. And I--I, who had forever fantasized about that hard won romance that survived trial and tribulation, put myself in the middle of many a relationship I should have left. And it sucked.
The most brutal one was the best. I stayed for four years with someone who made me love like I’d never loved before--who made me laugh--who celebrated me--who lived with me--and who could never stay faithful to me. Not once. Not ever. And the first time he admitted as much, I remember looking at the bath bomb in my hands (gold glitter, jasmine and honeysuckle scented), and thinking I could never smell it the same ever again.
I carried that with me, too.
Moving on from what you thought could be forever rips a part of you away. I once thought--however stupidly--that he and I would be forever. I wanted it so bad that I could feel it in my heart, inhale it the same way as all those flowers. I could reach into my imagination and touch it. The dream didn’t collapse so much as fall apart at the foundation. I was left with the wreckage. He didn’t care enough to look.
I’m older now. Sometimes I look ahead and I see myself alone forever. I think about Stevie Nicks and how she never found someone, either, contenting herself with the company she has. Maybe that’s enough. I swipe through dating sites and think about everything that could go wrong.
And sometimes, I dream a little again.
There was one night I went on a date without realizing it. It was rainy. I didn’t feel quite like going out, but I was asked and he seemed nice enough, so I did. We talked at the bar for hours. We trekked around the drizzly city late at night, sharing his umbrella. And then he kissed me, and when he did it was like the whole sky opened up and fell back into my chest again. God, I’ve never been kissed like that. But he was there for one night, and only one night, and I knew it. His cologne was a halo around us as we tangled up together to talk on the attic carpet, teenagers again.
And then he was gone.
I texted him the next day. “What was that cologne you were wearing?”
“Prada Black.”
And it isn’t love. I know that much. I don’t know what prepped me to hold my sanity together--the wreckage of my last Great Love or the knowing that this was temporary--but I went out and bought a little bottle of it, spritzing it over my pillows. At night I curl up in the bed and bury my nose into the dusty scent. I imagine what it might be like, to feel that kind of connection to someone for longer, to have courtesy and kindness be the mainstay, to part ways with a smile and a kiss and another day not be a promise lingering in the wind.
It isn’t love. But I think about him and the place he came from, and I wonder to myself: given enough time and effort, does love smell like Prada Black?
