Obsession by Calvin Klein

A note in the rain.

*Unedited first draft*

Jaguars love Calvin Klein’s Obsession – a perfume of balsamics, spices and rare woods. Bergamot. Mandarin. Lavender. Sage. Ambery finishes. 80’s in a bottle.

My old flatmate tells me this at a house party we go to and stand outside of, only talking to each other. It is difficult to imagine being a jaguar but it’s a little easier in relation to perfume.

What does it mean to have an obsession? I was never a fan of a band or a pop star or a film. Never poured over threads of comments about a rumour or a tour date but I think, in moving to a city I have lived in already, now grown in age and maybe in less numerical ways, too, I can reacquaint myself with obsession by enacting old habits and behaviours and then obsession over them too. London makes me want to be better, and I obsess over this idea of self optimisation whenever I visit. How do I make the most of my time here? How do I make the most out of my life here? I circle the temptation of self criticism like a jaguar around a leaf sprayed in Calvin Klein’s Obsession as a wildlife photographer catches the moment. What’s different is the honesty of friends catching me out instead – “Hattie, you’re not a piece of software to be updated & remodelled.” But then I think about it, obsess over that too, and think maybe I am.

A body is a limited vehicle with endless routes to take. I sat at a table this morning with friends I’ve known my entire adult life and found myself retelling stories of people I am in most ways estranged from, yet can reach with recollection. My new flatmate wears the same perfume an ex of mine used to wear, and I remember obsessing over the pursuit of it in a Parisian department store three years ago. Spraying my hair and bag and wallet in it and drenching those sample strips of cardboard with it, too. Burying it in my bag and carrying its associations with me for as long as it would last. Unpacking a rucksack I hadn’t used in years last weekend as I moved in to this new old city I used to live in, I found one of the sample card strips. The smell was completely gone but I could still reach for it, almost completely by memory. But it was an abstraction. Like remembering a voice or the feeling of a rough hand in your own. A recollection like a dead relative or the memory of hair that you’d lost down drains. I had shed this obsession with time, but remembered its face and sentiment.

In London, I walk new streets I’ve never seen before with names I’ve never read and I find myself imagining new affinities. Replacing obsession with them. Welcoming them. How careful and quiet they are instead. I am less scared of having an affinity. I don’t think an affinity could derail me. Lead me to Paris alone at midnight with wet hair and four euros and a phone with no signal. An affinity is more a babble than a rapid. I could invite an affinity over for dinner. Text my affinity to check in. See how my affinity is doing in the evenings. My affinity could be gentle. It could lap at me. It would not consume me.

I used to love the idea of someone being obsessed with me, or me being obsessed with them. The sort of precarious romance of unadulterated interest. Someone going to a department store in Madrid or LA or Prague with the sole purpose of finding me in a bottle and dousing themselves in me. Now, the whole thing seems –

but I suppose it could be nice too. Misery and interest is nice.

I saw this woman I used to know in a bakery yesterday. When I knew her, she worked for a medical investment firm, had a boyfriend from an indie pop band, wrists narrower than a french baguette and an unparalleled misery. Her bedroom was grey despite the turmeric dyed rich linen and fresh peonies in the window. I saw myself in her greyness, and so compared myself, too. I obsessed over it. I remember thinking –how can her grey be so functioning while mine is debilitating. How can I be grey, with additional bedding and NEOM candles? I didn’t think to myself – how can I become happy? or am I happy? or I don’t even like orange bedding.

Maybe I’m just thinking of comparison. The way it tricks you into desire.

I wake up in the night and see my old flatmate and I want to hug and kiss him because I can’t help it. Then I remember how sad I used to be when we lived together, and I feel better, and I circle the memory of myself before turning away from it. The wildlife photographer misses his chance. I don’t like Calvin Klein’s Obsession. It’s too floral. Too heady. I fall back to sleep and dream of mushrooms in a forest that look like the mushrooms in a calendar we bought last week. We bought it last week to decide when to eat dinner together in the week. Orzo pasta, turnip bake, rosemary chocolate cake, salmon pasta.

I remember obsessing over the pain of a heartbreak so much and thinking that I was obsessing over the other person. Thinking that it was an act of love, a display of my care – but really, I was just obsessing over myself. Obsessing over my own story. What was going on to or with or for or because of me.

It’s raining the kind of rain that makes London feel like home for the first time ever. Wet hair and thunder and headlights. And everyone in the street looks the same. And everyone stands under the canopy of the deli and instead of.saying, obsessing, focussing on how I can best be – I just sit for a bit and write this long muddied thing. I sit and look at everyone as they look the same when they run from the rain. Everyone looks the same when their feet step in a puddle.

It was a gample yeah yeah it was a gamble I know mate but are you telling me I shouldn’t have even tried to do it better?

The sky is purple.

London is purple.

I come back and I plug in my lightbulb and change it to purple.

I smell of soap and puddles and sweat and I feel the glimmer of a thing called contentment, and the glimmer of an affinity birthed from a storm.

An affinity for wet umbrellas.