Major Histocompatibility Complex is helluva drug.
So is psilocybin, I'll grant you, but that's not what this note is about.
I went on a date a little while after we broke up.
We started with coffee, went thrifting, walked all over, hit a barcade where she kicked my ass at pinball, had an amazing dinner, great conversations, held hands on the way back to the apartment. Everything clicked on paper. Hell, she even liked her whisky neat, no less.
But she smelled wrong, Vanessa.
There was literally something about the taste of her lips, her scent, her sort of essence that just hit me the wrong way.
You're the opposite, obviously, and it's goddamn twisted, but you know what? I like your BO. I like your morning breath. I like your Strawberry Armani vape-and-perfume mélange.
I still have this image burned into my head, of you in full Tantric Mushroom Sex Goddess mode, with that super cute blissed out smile of yours, burrowing into my sweaty armpit and sniffing, in the afterglow of I don't know how many hours of the same Division of Laura Lee record on repeat, under the pulsing lights of that goofy star lamp.
There was always something about the two us being close together physically that seemed to pull us together like iron filings to a magnet.
Is it pheremones? Simple genetics? Some cosmic thing? Astrology? Mercury retrograde in Uranus? Does it matter? I've only felt attraction like that a few other times in my life, and honestly? Never as strongly. And don't get me wrong, you're gorgeous, but it's well beyond looks or physical attraction at all, it's sort of... Elemental, I guess.
And regardless of where things are right now, regardless of whether they ever change, I know it's the same for you, because I've seen it. I've felt it.
Hell, I've tasted it and smelled it.
I do try to remind myself how lucky I am to have even had that kind of connection to another person... It's something most people go their whole lives without.
So thanks, Universe, I guess...
Thanks for an accident of random chance and genomic diversity that made a connection like that to another person fall into my life, however briefly, whether that person ever falls back into it or not.