Monday, September 29, 2003

Your Dead Girlfriend's Dirty Black Sweatjacket Still Smells Like Her Hair, And Your Dead Girlfriend's Hair Always Smelled Like Fire Day!

You search every morning when you wake up with the jacket in your arms, and you search again most Saturday nights after 2 AM, but there aren't any strands left.

You took them for granted. When you first pulled the jacket from underneath the afghans, it was caked with so many stray strands of her hair you were forced to wonder whether she had had more to worry about than she ever let on to you. You'd pull the strand from the bosom of the jacket and let it coil up in your palm, and you'd set aside a few days at a time to just lay in bed and stroke that lock of your dead girlfriend's hair, but you never made it past a few hours. Hair just disappears. One distracted glance and it either catches a breeze and floats away to the dustbunnies under the bed or it just stops being.

Maybe you and the strand of hair have that in common. Maybe the strand of hair feels that continuing to exist without your dead girlfriend around is just as pointless as you do. But maybe the strand of hair has the power to simply will itself out of the universe, whereas you have to use a gun and/or pills.

No more strands of her hair left. It's been four months of intensely regimented mourning after all. But the scent is still there. The one you used to smell when you pressed your lips down upon the top of that parted-down-the-middle mop of deep deep stringy brown.

You smelled fire. Not smoke, ash, sulphur or the debris of aftermath, but only the fire. Perfect, terrifying flame. The scent it would release if it could ever roam alone. If it could ever wear a belt or drink a glass of whiskey. If a flame could weigh something, that's what her hair stunk of.

And it's what her jacket still stinks of. So stay in bed and hold it over your eyes and your nose and your mouth and your neck and breathe it in. It's perfect.

Happy Your Dead Girlfriend's Dirty Black Sweatjacket Still Smells Like Her Hair, And Your Dead Girlfriend's Hair Always Smelled Like Fire Day!