Extracts from A SENSE OF SCENT (a longer product I am working on)

Ch #? Entitled: A love tap for a friend. A moment outside her body.

So far everything had been easy. She landed and felt like the plane had taken her out of time and deposited her in another life. Traveling always had this effect on her. And long ago, instead of trying to figure out the psychology behind this feeling of displacement, she decided to just let it take her places. Her paradise green suitcase stitched with fleshy pink lotus flowers clasped her hand and adorned her side. A scarf tied in a droopy bow around her neck, while wearing a crème hat that fell over her pronounced eyebrows and extended to her shoulders, Claudelean looked the part like traveling was in her blood, like a snapshot come to life. Awaiting her arrival was a van who would take her to the dock. She climbed in for the two-hour drive and slid down the pleather seat to the window, saying nothing and feeling everything. She watched the driver all hunched over at the wheel, giving a honk and a wave to the passing cars and noticed how every time the car went over a rock, the driver responded with an animated bounce of his shoulders as if he had been driving for years, and by now, he and the car felt the same things. Claudelean could tell he was proud of his own personal space and it made her feel like she had been invited to spend the afternoon in his home. She laughed because it seemed endearing and because everything simple and genuine brought her that much closer to happiness.

"Whatcu’ got a smile growing across your face for?" He teased her like a grandfather would do, while the corners of his eyes curved upwards similar to her smile.

The way you honk is so different than it is in Manhattan. Yours is more like a love tap. While back home it sounds like the cars are arguing. 

"Oh no, no arguing here. These people are my friends."

Claudelean felt cleansed and with her face flushed with sea air, she let herself indulge in the experience. The van winded down the hills and closing her eyes, she felt she was descending into a waking dream. Falling, falling, falling through time and almost removed from her body completely. 

Ch #? Entitled: I am a memory come alive, a thought in sight you cannot do without.

When Peanut embarked at sunset, Claudelean was on the sailboat’s deck. With her face turned toward the sky, watching the daylight being eaten and swallowed by the hour, Llurence found her. He waited, shadowed in the distance, unnoticed; wanting the moment he finally saw her again to stretch on—needing it to feel as long as it seemed when he imagined it happening so often before. The moment they shared the same space again had taken him forever to get to. And now, he hoped it would last. He hoped the sky, the only reminder of time while at sea, would stay suspended. 

She seemed to be living an intense inner life, which no outer impression could penetrate. But she did not look oblivious to this. In fact, Claudelean looked liked she had covered her face with a mask to conceal how tired and worried it had become. Others may believe it would be a great gift to see and simultaneously feel. But sometimes Claudelean felt like life had betrayed her by giving her this overwhelming pressure to have awareness externally and internally and all at once. She could not help but think it prevented her from living life with complete confidence and most importantly, from living quite normally and naturally. The magnitude of perceptions were constantly transforming and intensifying her perspectives and if one looked close enough within her, one could see that Claudelean’s mind inhabited chaos. 

But Llurence could not see this. Her back was turned and it was only her subtle gestures that he could try and make sense of. He thought she seemed familiar, as if time and distance had not completely changed the Claudelean he knew. This made him feel like time had worked in her advantage and his too. He believed it had not taken them beyond their memories and that they would be safe in the future this trip would unfold. "As long as I can make the moment memorable so I can see her smile, we will be happy," he thought. Seeing how she mirrored the sea, he admired her as always and like any lover would. Claudelean and the sea seemed the same, essentially gentle and contemplative, and this made him feel like he could escape into the body of both and be impressed by the sight of either. But she was so within her own scene, apart of her surroundings, yet entirely removed at the same time. She was a metaphysical speculation—he reasoned with intellectual mockery—neither here nor there, not entirely real or unreal either. This thought made him walk forward with the familiar desire to touch her, to reach her, to enter into a world that was locked away from the reality of others. 

He touched her between her shoulder blades, which were spread like wings. She turned slowly like a musical key that was not advancing and with the awareness of a musician playing out an effect. But when they came face to face, she saw Llurence not as he is, but as he was, not as the moment made him appear, but as the memories made him seem. They were inescapable and it was there—the first moment meeting each other again—that she remembered what she thought she couldn’t and remembered what she promised would have been forgotten by now. 

She saw quick scenes playing like vignettes taken from the film of their life together. They were scenes where everything was illuminated to seem not not real, but unreal and unbelievable. A collection of stop motion moments: newspaper mornings on the summer porch, a Santa Monica night spent inside a lighthouse, a picnic in a graveyard, her lips stained red, asleep on his shoulder, cinema and a thermos of wine like only young romantics would do. She saw him and smiled. And he saw his hope extending through her—the hope that the distance had not changed her.

In passing I have dreamt this familiarity, and still now, I see I know I’d like even more a kiss to you, but I, I am breathless.

"You have always been, but now even more so. How can it be possible? Claudelean, you look beautiful. Healthy. Full of life."

So it’s that noticeable? The winter use to be the only thing that made my cheeks fuller, but now being a writer puts the pounds on me too! It was true. Her weight had increased, but she did not look heavier. She looked, just as Llurence had said, full of life. She looked like she was enjoying life, not suffering from it. Perhaps it was her poetic license for illusion. Llurence thought it was a shame that the act of indulgence carried such a negative connotation in society today, as if one should have to apologize for experiencing what makes one happy. 

"You are always too hard on yourself. Don’t be," he said emphatically. Llurence saw through her formidable exterior, he always had, and behind her shield was what he loved: the unnecessary insecurity, the fragility and the vulnerability that made her so soft and sincere. She was not a perfectionist, just a real idealist. He remembered her often declaring. But he saw through that, too. It was just an excusable title she thought she could exercise until she found solace in something truer to character, something open and honest. But she had not found it yet. 

No, I am not being hard on myself. I am being hard on you! And with a persuasive laugh, she pressed her finger over his lips that were opening like a bud, as if to say either two things: I have the last word or Don’t say my secret aloud. Her eyes said please.

Llurence understood. Claudelean had not changed. 

Ch #? Entitled: She let the moment be his instead.

"At sea, in the middle of nothingness, I lack nothing. Before coming, I knew this, and asked for you and no more. We have made it and now the weather has no worry. See how the sky displays its expression and spreads around us a clearing of sanity. We can see everything. And what a surprise to have no secrets! There is nothing we cannot know."

But man is nature, unpredictable and uncontrollable. 

"Not here. Not this time. Not now, for us, on this sea."

Hearing only illusions, she laughed at this poet who spoke as if he were seeing through a screen in his imagination and using words that had not been filtered through reality. But it was not a poet she was staring at. It was Llurence and his voice had changed. 

Don’t get ahead of yourself, Crazy. 

"You still call me that," he said through the mist her sentence made. It was endearing. It was a reminder. It was a nickname he had not forgotten, but had not been used since their relationship ended. He had hoped that if he ever heard it again, it would feel familiar. And it did, just then, promising him that a name had the power to resonate forever. 

Always. And even when I’m not calling you that, I’m still thinking you’re crazy. She spoke with coyness as if each word were flirting with the sentence it stood within. It felt fun and fresh, like something she was good at, but hadn’t had time to do in awhile. She came closer to him, guaranteeing they would share the moment even more and said, An outsider—her hand now wrapping at his waist—no matter how close, can not know precisely the extent of another. And perhaps, the individual does not know either, unless they are deeply acquainted with themselves. Letting her hand come loose and fall on the railing, she purposefully had her speech stretch into space so the silence of the sea could emphasize the meaning of her discourse. No one can control nature, Llurence, no matter how well one knows its behavior. Take the waves, for insistence, and watch how they are constantly fleeing their partner who is so close behind, but probably began chasing a moment too late. Will they ever tire out and come together in forgiveness, leaving the sea with no agitation, just one long sigh? Who knows! Perhaps, they are not in flight from each other but trying to escape us. Look at everyone fixated on the sea, maybe the waves think they are being studied and don’t want to be seen. 

He took his time turning, letting his stance fall into a comfortable angle on the rail so his back was against the sea, as if his attention had grown distant from it, appearing to prove his fixation was not on the waves, but Claudelean herself. "You can’t convince me so easy, Claudelean," he said with eyes that revealed he felt otherwise. "I know you think it’s time to stop thinking like a child, but I’m still a believer. And I believe we’re still of the age where we can think we know it all, just so we can live a little more."

Claudelean smiled. He hadn’t changed. His pacific eyes were still blue with sleep and his sandy hair was still curled and springing with life. Behind the poet façade, there was still Llurence with his lyrical lines he’d never loose because he always had hope and a child’s heart. She loved him for it. She always would because it was the one thing she felt maturity had taken from her. She loved him. It just killed her seeing him trying to be someone for her, still. She just wanted him. Not the poet, the artist, the actor. Llurence played a deeper part in her life and seeing him again brought upon a pain, the pain of reality, that once love touched you, the feeling would never go away and your skin would have the imprint for life. You will always be a dreamer, Llurence. 

"A believer."

Yes and that, too. But she did not say it because she believed there was a distinction that he was not yet accepting.