Fougère
This is the love that becomes worship. You had been told that this love was reserved only for God. But it became the love that he gave you. And you saw it clearly when he began gaining satisfaction just from sitting around and watching you smile. On the night at the Crescent’s Balcony when he lit scented candles and the black sky had diamond eyes, you were lost in his fougère and got drunk in this love that was his worship for you.
You were yet to learn that love was hardly sustained in its pure form. That the body in the person lends its own scent to the fragrance of love.
“Where are you?”
“At the stadium making my hair. Why?”
“I’m coming to see you now.” He hung up.
He sat there watching until the last braid came out fine and the hot water treatment was done and the hair rolled into a bun.
His eyes dipped through yours into your soul and connected to its livewire. He held your hands like you were his breath – he would die if he ceased to hold on – and walked you home. When he kissed you, it was a prayer on his lips: do not ever leave me or I’ll die. You didn’t think you were going to. Who rejects worship? Even the gods crowd around ancestral shrines begging for it.
What do you know
about this love that feeds on itself?
It grows when it dies.
You just stepped out of a crowded classroom after taking a suffocating grammar test when a message popped up on your screen: can you send me a heart?
You smiled. You could send it every day.
The first frankincense whiff left you confused. You didn’t know it was what hid beneath bergamot and olibanum. Frankincense was severe worship. And worship was a creeper that held the worshipped imprisoned.
I was here waiting for you and you were busy with that guy. What were you talking about? Is he better than I am?
Wait for me. I want to walk you home.
On some days, you wanted to walk home with the girls. But a deity is meant to answer faithful prayers.
Months later, you would walk away, and he would not die. Because you became a tired deity begging for retirement. You had realised that power, more subtle and effective, belonged to the worshipper. And you were not God; only God could handle worship.
Vanilla and Lavender
Vanilla is what you smell like and now, you can finally sleep.
“I jump in the bathtub; it’s time to get all clean. I’ll be the cleanest kid you ever seen…” she sings along with you and for you as she scrubs your body with the caressing foam. She tickles you, and your laughter mingling with the sound of the water she pours over you is the most vivifying sound you’ve ever heard. She lets you beat and splash the water in the tub, and watches you do it with so much gusto that it splashes on her and all over the surrounding floor. A pink towel is what she picks and wraps you in. She had bought all your baby stuff pink. Lavender was always your scent in the first years.
Her husband doesn’t want his daughter taking excessive sugar baked in cakes and frozen in ice cream cones, but your scanty-toothed smile is enough reward and makes the disobedience even more trifling. So you both stop by the ice cream store to pick your favourite flavour, vanilla. Always vanilla.
Lavender and vanilla occasion nostalgia for you. They are what you find when memory deeps its hands into the coven of your early childhood.
Jasmine
He was the first person you said yes to (you were on campus and you weren’t going to pass through it without letting it pass through you), agreeing to be his girlfriend. You thought it was only right that you agreed even though the age gap, you were sure, was not the two-year class gap.
He was there during the departmental conference, an exco. You didn’t listen much to what was being said, not with the phone on your hand. The SUG elections…you must participate. Go there, vote the candidates from your department. You heard this part because it had been attached to your GPA. Ten marks in Udoma’s course if you voted… Don’t vote and lose your marks… Secure your GPA! What did you know? You were only a fresher.
You plugged your earpiece back into your ears when the speakers had gone off and the conference had come to a close, and you made to leave the hall when the rush to go out was over.
You were getting up from your seat, but you could feel a body obstructing your exit. The body would give way soon, you thought. But you were wrong because you almost toppled over him.
He immediately said something, apologizing.
Unplugging your earpiece, dropping your bag, adjusting the fringe of hair on your face, you could now look into the yellow face and punk-styled guy in front of you.
“The welfare officer,” you breathed hard.
“Oh. That’s right.”
He had seen you for the first time at the orientation and only now did he have the opportunity to talk to you. He offered the help you were going to ask for sooner than later. Care was what you had known love to be and that was what he gave you—care that smelt of the warmth of clary sage, and jasmine, and ylang-ylang. You were a trophy he flaunted before his friends. But you didn’t know that trophies oftentimes meant conquests. And gathering trophy collections were a continuous sport.
You would return from the second semester break to meet him cold and evasive. You would see the trophy that he replaced you with at the bonfire night. In truth, you cannot compete with her curves. He would make you believe that your warmth had gone two drops beneath itself and that you had failed to add up the spice.
It is the first time you feel cold from a hearth. A cold that threatens to freeze your soul. You still hadn’t learnt to walk away from the ash that was the previous night’s fire.
Grapefruit
Before frankincense, he was there, warm as nutmeg, comfortably sour like grapefruit. He was the first to appear at the slightest difficulty you had. He looked like you could tell him anything even though he hardly talked about himself. But you didn’t bother. You were the problem teller, and he was the problem solver. And he had compliments wrapped in every fibre of indirectness he could find: You have this smart way of answering questions. Beautiful girls like wearing black hair. Gap-toothed people look more beautiful when they smile.
So he was your right-hand man, the home in a place far from home. How to say no to you was the only thing he didn’t know to do well because boy was he smart! If you were the girl who wanted a male bestie, he was definitely the right call.
But you didn’t realise that the “how are you doing?” was more than knowing about your welfare. You didn’t know that the “are you sure you are fine?” was the beat of a heart that admired you. Eyes that lit up when they saw you and lips that curved into a smile to pronounce your name. He was like an extension of your hand. He was like something that’ll always be there, like water.
But grapefruit played in elegance and played in romance. How could you have known that love was spelt home, that love couldn’t be so different from breathing? Until you were overwhelmed in fougère and broke the heart of this love you didn’t recognise. This love that was afraid to be known for what it was.
After your fougère expedition, you came to realise that even home wasn’t always left abandoned. Home had other members to fill it. There was no more room at home for you.
Mint
Smell is the sense of memory and desire – Jacques Rousseau
Enthrallment. Fascination. Adoration. Crushing. Many names have been suggested for what a twelve-year-old junior school girl could possibly be feeling for her new Mathematics mister. You didn’t know how it came to be, but a certain kind of alertness overwhelmed you whenever he was around. You were super attentive, spreading your attention to cover both the words he spoke and the way his mouth shaped them, what he wrote on the board and the flourish with which his fingers spilled them. His jaw wore an acutely carved beard. Acutely – what the word meant, you were not sure, but you chose it because cute was somewhere in between.
His voice! There appeared to be the sound /z/ in every sentence he pronounced. And subconsciously, you came to believe that /z/ was the most beautiful consonant sound. You would line up the names of your unborn children to have a z in them: Chiemezue, Edozie, Chiemezie, Ozi…
You took in deep breaths whenever his randomly roving eyes focused on you. But the impact of his person was not particular on you. The entire class took on a different ambience with his presence, and even the queen bee became more notorious.
Something was subtly minty about his scent, and made you think of the North for Men Subzero deodorant your cousin used. Like he could be the perfect model for it. The Maths teacher became the centre of your school activities. You thought of ways to give him a gift that would be special to him but would appear random to other people nonetheless. You thought of gifting him a portrait, but you couldn’t draw. You could write him a poem, you thought, but then you couldn’t write either. So you did the only thing you could when the chance came. His lesson note got into your hands and you wrapped it in a magazine leaf that had hearts all over it and handed it back to him.
“What’s your temperament?” he asked. His smile told he was trying to match the act to the character trait. It would be the first and only personal question he would ask you before leaving the school. The question would keep you excited, make you think you had something distinct in you.
But the Maths teacher was as wise as any other sensible adults who knew they were objects of their students’ fantasies. He gave you attention just enough to sustain a moderate interest. He was cool and strict, like mint.
Genoa Lemon
Wake up. Take a glass of water. Plug in earpiece. Begin your thirty-minute daily jogging. There comes a time in a girl’s life when she realises that everything she ever wanted was locked away in a room with the keys hidden somewhere inside of her. And not until she found that secret room would she begin to crown herself a goddess. She would join a ladies support group, and begin to play Ava Max’s Kings and Queens.
You returned from your workout, took a shower, and dressed up for the day. In front of the mirror, you called yourself fifteen amazing names, extoled yourself a couple times, and proclaimed yourself five powerful personalities. Everything around you was antiseptic clean, hence why declutter suddenly became your favourite word.
By the time the sun was shedding its last goodness of Vitamin D, You had lemon tea in your mug.
“It keeps me mentally alert,” you say to those who wonder why aloud. What you didn’t know was that Genoa Lemon was simply the fragrance of self-love.
Nenye Okoye writes. She is also a beauty entrepreneur and a student at the University of Nigeria Nsukka. Find her on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn as Nenye Okoye.