Major Histocompatibility Complex is helluva drug.
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. Portland native, punk chick, secretary for Skagit Valley DSA. Everything clicked on paper, heck she even liked my whisky, neat no less.
But she smelled wrong, Vanessa.
Probably some of it was me going through everything I was going through, sure. But there was literally something about the taste of her lips, her scent, her sort of essence that just hit me the wrong way.
You are one of a tiny handful of humans (Deja's another) that I feel an almost magnetic physical pull toward.
And it's goddamn twisted, but you know what? I like your BO. I like your morning breath. I still have this image burned into my head, of you in full Tantric Mushroom Sex Goddess mode, with this manic little blissed out smile, burrowing into my sweaty underarm 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's something about the two us being close together physically that pulls us together like iron filings to a magnet.
I guess the first time I really felt it was at 4AM in August, last summer, seeing you off on that Lime bike.
We kissed for what seemed like a good twenty minutes, and just couldn't stop ourselves -- we'd come up for air, say goodnight, and then go at it again, almost as if we had no will of our own.
Is it pheremones? Simple genetics? Probably, but does it matter? I've only felt attraction like that a few other times in my life, and never, or almost never, as strongly.
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 hope I get to do so again, but I also need to remind myself how lucky I am to have ever had that kind of link to someone. It's something most people go their whole lives without finding.
So thanks, Universe, I guess.
Thanks for an accident of random chance and genetics that made this cosmic connection fall into my lap, whether it ever falls back again or not.
But I really hope it does, somehow.