At the age of thirty three (and a half!) I have an easy time guessing the endings of movies by the time I’m five or ten minutes in. I love discovering a new author, but I’ve observed that they often only have one story to tell. One author might write a few books, but the basic plot pieces – heart, lines, and meat – are all the same. The tempo of my life at this age is starting to speed up, my days are running into one another like a timelapse of different but similar sunsets, all linked, beginning to end, end to beginning to end.

I ponder what I would do with my time if I did not spend it lolling about in front of a warm heater, endlessly reading, consuming, hunting, dreaming of perfume. Perhaps I would work more. Or knit more. Read more books, watch more movies.

But I’ve knit 39 pairs of socks in the past ten years – that’s 78 times I’ve turned a heel, started or finished a toe, knit up or down to or from the cuff. There is only so much time I can spend being passionate about work, only so many tens of thousands of digital images I want to process, social media updates I want to make, or client outreach that I’ve got in me. There are only so many good movies on Netflix, and only so many authors whose books fit the needs of my mood at that exact moment, and whose story I haven’t read in one of their other books already.

But perfume.

Ahhh, perfume.

Perfume is never predictable.

Once you spray it, you might not be entirely surprised where you end up, or how it feels getting there, but until you press that nozzle down, and hear that “pffft” – you just never know what’s going to happen.

Smells. The Last Frontier for those too weary for travel, too wary for adventurous and risky sexual escapades, the last frontier for she who has spent countless hours and thousands of dollars delving into the mysterious caverns of her psyche, and for she who would rather be sung to and cooked for than do those things herself, while reading about…

Perfume.