two bottles of women's perfume

 

A safe place is a smell:

I keep two bottles of women's perfume.

They are the same perfume.

It took me years to find it, trying to recapture the smell of M and not finding it till I met D who wore the same fragrance. Thinking of M, I bought some and gave it a whiff now and then. Later, when I wanted to remember D, I'd take a whiff of it then. But I didn't want to get them confused and out of respect for them, for two very different people, and two very different relationships, I was forced to to buy another bottle. I also didn't want the associations with the same smell to get confused. I had to make a visual distinction between the two, and I didn't want to label the one "m" and the other "d" (in case someone should see), I used a dab of nail polish and put a spot n one of the bottles.

There was a great debate whose should get the paint as neither of them would use red fingernail polish. At least not then. I'm not going to ell you which one.

So involved in capturing the past. In a group workshop, we were told to imagine a safe place. I couldn't do it without making something up from somebody else's image or other I'd seen in the form of a photo or something somebody had put into a song or a story. But later I could. I now put my failure to conjure a sage lace down to another example of my "don't tell me what to do" way of thinking.

And now other safe places are springing up. Not all from the past.

People, places. We're going there.