Her Perfume

The morning of December 6th, 2013 was especially terrible. Woke up. Felt nauseous. Ate breakfast anyway. Threw up. Drove to work anyway.

Thankfully, work wasn't all that terrible. And it was a Friday. As bad as the last few days have been, sometimes a good weekend could cure all of that.

It's a tale as old as time: Guy meets girl. Guy or girl swoons the other. They fall in love. Tough times happen. One or the other can't handle it. One or the other leaves. One or the other feels the wrath of love's ugly side--despair. Repeat.

Sometimes the best way to proceed through life is with the idea in mind that: "Life sucks, and then you die." Sometimes life sucks more than usual. Sometimes we find people, or we find activities in our lives, that make life suck a little less. With Renee, life didn't suck at all.

Though it's hard to conceptualize heartbreak for anyone, for me it looked like 5'7" dark brown hair, blue-eyed Renee Winter. It's been about 3 months since she cut ties with what she once deemed "our everlasting bond," but each morning I woke up it still felt like a rhino was sitting on my chest. Sometimes I legitimately wondered if I was having a heart attack, but no, it was just Jake. Jake is what I call the rhino. Sometimes Jake found someone else to sit on in the morning, but over the previous three months he had grown quite fond of my chest. At 6-feet, 145lbs, I'm not quite sure why he found it so damn comfortable to sit on me.

Big boss-man took the day off, so leaving work a little early wasn't an issue. The road roared on the way home. Everyone tries to leave a little early on Fridays, and with school in session there were a lot of kids getting picked up at around the 4 o'clock hour. My favorite radio station played my favorite songs, but sometimes those songs made me think too much. I slammed my steering wheel with my right hand, and then shook off the urge to keep thinking all of those "what-ifs." I took one giant deep breath and kept driving. Sometimes long drives to and from work, which mine was the hour-plus variety, are good and bad. They're really good when things are going well, and really awful when things are going awful. The saving grace of long drives while I'm feeling upset is that I'm alone. No one in those moments, who I care about, has to see the debacle that is my sadness.

My friends wanted to head down to a bar in downtown Buffalo called Hot Mama's Canteen. Winter--the season--if you're not familiar with Buffalo during the long, dark months that prelude and subsequent the Winter Solstice, then I can tell you: Is. Fuck. Cold. And with the moisture coming off of lake Erie its probably not hard to imagine how awful the snow gets, too. In case it is, think feet. Ever since Ms. Winter threw me into the cold dark cavern of depression, my friends--DJ, Todd, and Reese--did their best to give me fun nights out.

It was historically dry that year. Cold. Dreadfully frigid like every year, but without the snow the beginning of winter was tolerable. When you're from Buffalo, it's important to make it abundantly clear that you can handle the cold. If you can't handle the cold, it might be hard to find friends in Buffalo, because other than the summer months, Buffalo loves being colder than what any normal person is used to. So how do you prove you can handle the cold? Walk places.

Hot Mama's Canteen was walking distance from all of us so everyone met at my place, and we went from there.

"Can't wait to see girls in jackets! I like a girl in a jacket," DJ proclaimed.
"Well, that's not exactly narrowing it down, Deej. It's late fall," teased Reese. "Plus, this isn't about you, this is about our fragile little Colin. Awh, just look at hiiiiim."
"Yo, really, Reese?" Todd chimes in annoyed. "Wouldn't want to bring up your mopey self after what happened with Janine. And we even warned you that things didn't seem right with her!"
"Alright, ladies, that's enough," I say. Sometimes their bickering is exhausting. "I'm not dealing with your shit tonight."

Everyone remained silent for the rest of the walk. As we passed the hipster-themed bar that looks a lot more like a coffee house--Hydrolic Hearth--I stopped in my tracks.

"Whaaaat just happened?" DJ confusedly inquires.
"Do you smell that?!? I know that smell!"

I sprinted to the front doors of the Hearth. Easy to see everywhere inside the place because of the numerous glass windows, I looked for Renee. She had to be in here. I knew that smell better than anything. At this point, the guys were behind me unsure of what they were looking for.

"Ugh, is this about Renee?" Todd says in disgust.
"Dude, shut up. Do you see her or not?"
"No." Todd responds without even looking through the window.
"Oh, thanks." I retort apathetically. "I'm going in."

Just before I took my first step inside, a rush of memories flooded my mind as though my brain turned into a View Master. The perfume, its creator. Click, memory. Click, memory. Click, memory. With each memory carried an emotion. With each emotion, a smile, a laugh, a cry, a kiss, anger, resentment, the woods, the park, the lake, the pizza shop, the wedding. Click, memory. Click, memory. Click, memory. I didn't know it, but my eyes were closed, and all of the sudden my head felt light. Under my coat, sweat beaded across my body, but not because I was warm.

I hear Dashboard Confessional's song "Vindicated," but I don't remember being near a radio.

Flat on my back outside of the Hearth, I woke up to numerous people surrounding me.

"Colin's back!" someone shouted. I forget where I was for a moment, but the cold helped my senses catch the right gear. I started to form questions.

"What happened?" As I asked, I sat up really quickly looking around, and I started to recognize faces. I saw DJ. Saw Reese. Saw other people who must of come out of the Hearth to wonder if I died. Saw...Winter.

"Where's Todd?" I asked with a sense of frustrated purpose. I heard Todd laugh right behind my ear. At this point he was holding me up behind me so I didn't go face first back onto the cold concrete.

"Dude, you totally faded. What happened?" Todd inquired.
"Sonova fuck, don't worry about it. Can we get that drink?" I couldn't believe it. The smell of the perfume flooded me with so many memories that I must have passed out. I had never passed out before by that point, but at least I got to hear good music on the way down. The good news was that I felt a sense of apathy. When I came to I had noticed that the smell did indeed come from Renee. She had a blank, semi-concerned look on her face when I looked in her direction, but she quickly hid her face and tried to reel her friends back inside.

There was so much I wanted to say. I wanted to tell her that she was beautiful. I wanted to tell her how much I still cared about her despite the heart-wrenching pain she put me through. I wanted to talk to her about that time we sat by the lake over the summer, and how I loved the way the sun ricocheted off the water and hit her face--her skin shimmering with the slight undulation of the water as if for a brief moment they were intertwined. I wanted to say so many things.

When I finally got up, Todd and DJ each took an arm of mine to make sure I wasn't going to timber for a second time. Everyone who came out of the Hearth to create a kind of semi-circle seen at funerals asked if I was OK before going back inside. I was fine. My friends all had a decent idea of what happened, so they all tried to keep me from looking into the Hydrolic Hearth as we meandered onward towards Hot Mama's.

"Wow," DJ half-whispers under his breath, "Her scent is your Kryptonite."
Todd and Reese quickly shot looks at DJ to non-verbally signal, "Really? Right now?"

With subtlety, I start laughing. Then my laughter became increasingly more audible. At some point I was hunched over with my hands on my knees belting laughter. No one else knew what was going on.

"Her scent is my Kryptonite!" I proclaimed. And that's when I realized I was insane. That's when I realized that not saying anything was the best thing for me. She has her life. She chose her path. She wants little to do with me, and there was nothing I was going to do to help either of our situations. Plus, I loved her. Sometimes letting go is the best gesture of love that one can offer for the sake of the other's happiness. Her scent wasn't my Kryptonite, although it was definitely funny to think about: I was. I was my own Kryptonite.

We went on to Hot Mama's and had a terrific evening. It was exactly what I needed.

I learned a couple things that night. 1. Stop passing out, just get weed. I hear it emulates the moments right after passing out, and if there's one thing passing out did for me it was that it helped me realize that happiness was up to me. Although I never ended up having much weed, I still probably should have, and 2.

Some things are better left unsaid.

A lot easier said now that--three years later--autumn is over and Winter is back.

-PatInTheHat