Sometimes I wanna bottle scents. Those smells. The smells that break your heart. The smells that put you together. The fragrances that takes the fragments in you and makes them whole. I want to bottle them. And sometimes I want to scrub myself with them. Sometimes I want to use it like it's soap. Sometimes I want to scrub and scrub and scrub. Pushing down with my right hand and rubbing the scent into my left arm, with a loofa or washcloth or anything. I want to felt it go past my skin and through my bloodstream. Into my veins. I want my arm to turn red. Like I want to push it past the surface and into the part of me that matters. I want the scent pumping through me instead of whatever normally does it. I think I would live better that way. Sometimes, I mean.
Other times I seem to have the opposite urge. Sometimes I feel like the smell is already inside me. Waiting patiently to be smelt. And then I smell it. I smell it when the stranger walks by at the grocery store. I smell it when I get too close to forgetting what it smells like. I smell it and I feel something rush up from my toes and right to the middle of my heart. It's not always pleasant, this feeling. Sometimes I think my heart burts. Because this scent has something on me. It know me too well. It's been there, at 3am when I can't fall asleep. It's like this scent wants to be my undoing, wants to cause my reckoning. Because it reminds me of a time that's gone. A time that never was. A what that will never be. These times, I don't want to scrub. I want to pull. I want to rip off the surface and yank the scent from inside of me. I want to throw it away in a trash bin and light it on fire. I never want to smell that smell again...
but it is such a sweet smell.
So I put out the fire, bottle the scent, and scrub until it's inside again.
