The Stars Perfume

A really pretty fresh green. The mandarin becomes prominent in the dry down, but I wish I got more melon!

Musky, sharp citrus scent. The grapefruit really stands out on my skin, but there is also an underlying muskiness that reminds me a bit of Jarnsaxa, although it does not stand out as much as that one. Maybe it's the ambergris. I like it, especially after it has been on my skin for a while; it softens up while retaining the citrus bite it had in the beginning. It lasts a long time, too.

Aldehydes, electric, immediate; sharp brightness dilating your pupils involuntarily in a dark room. Charles Burchfield's Orion in Winter translated into scent: stars throbbing with impossible light, night sky crackling with energy. Meadow grass electric chorus, alive, buzzing, participating in the same frequency as hyperaware consciousness. Three in the morning and your mind is racing, a thousand moth wings, each drawn to multitudinous flames, darkness reaches its deepest saturation point, clocks hold their breath. Not anxiety, not exhiliration, but a secret third thing that my typo revealed to me just now: axhilirating [axhilirating: adj. the specific exhilaration that contains within it the seeds of its own anxiety; excitement at the precise frequency of existential dread.] Fairy lights threaded around the orange tree, infused with the spirit of the fruit; juiced, bulbs and strands and all; gulped in a single breath, time hiccups, everything shifts and blurs, cold light pooling in your lungs like a chandelier of stars, like the crushed peal of a high, clear bell, like swallowing the click of diamond high heels on marble. Something plasticky, glassine and strange—this entire thrumulent, glintiform experience sealed in a clear envelope, preserved for examination later, when you've had proper sleep and can make sense of this crackling complicity with life the universe and everthing, when standing in a winter meadow looking up at burning stars felt less like metaphor and more like a language that you, the only person left in the world awake and alive, can speak.