The Keep Things

By the time she died my mom and I had different taste in almost everything. Colors. Clothes. Me. But we agreed about Opium. The perfume. Not the drug. We may have agreed about the drug too, but we didn’t talk about it. My mom was not big on talk. Ever. And she had the forgetting condition, so by the end, there was almost no talk. Once when she wanted to refer to my new maybe boyfriend, she took two finger and scissored them towards each other, going them from a V to an I. I knew what she meant immediately. Without words. And maybe that was true of Opium too. Smell is beyond words. And it was in the beyond words place that we were ok together.