Eau D'Amour

Rating: PG


I didn’t see you walking backwards with her hands filled with shoe boxes. This might have been because I was also walking backwards, except that I was carrying a blender. Only in Target could something like this happen. Needless to say, we collided. Hard. We both lost our balance and landed on the floor, but not before knocking over a display of Halston perfume. We became covered in the eau de toilette, as did our purchases. I looked over at you, sprawled out on the floor, surrounded by boxes of shoes, your name-tag askew on your perfume-dripped uniform. You looked at me, hair wet with perfume, blender smashed a few feet away in its crushed box.
We both apologized profusely, claiming distraction and our own faults. I helped you up, trying not to slip in the puddles of perfume. The air smelt very heavily of this aforementioned substance, and the management was quick to run over.
They yelled at you, called you ignorant, said you’d have to pay for everything. I interjected, saying that I was the one who bumped into you, knocking you into the display. They said they would have “none of it”, citing that the customer is always their top priority. You were whisked away by the management, shoes left in the aisle, perfume everywhere, and my blender in ruins.
It’s months later and I finally got my new blender. I never saw you again, though. I never forgot about you and the events that took place.
A month further on, I met another woman in a dimly lit club. We hit it off, talking endlessly about nothing, buying each other drinks, flirting up a storm. There was something familiar about her, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It wasn’t her looks or her personality. I had to break it off with her; whatever it was about her that was so familiar was making me sad. A week later, as I was trying to figure it out in my head, it finally hit me. It was her perfume: Halston.