lavender, spearmint, and herb garden

lavender

my girlfriend’s favorite smell is lavender.
i have memory issues for five reasons;
psychological chemistry,
vitamin deficiency,
a diagnosed mental health issue,
an undiagnosed mental health issue,
and something else that i can’t remember.
but i remember that her favorite smell is lavender.
i point it out, and often, candles and perfumes,
soaps and patterns and detergent,
incense, even though i know she hates the smell of smoke.
she teases me for it.
she knows why i try so hard to remember it.
she knows me well enough to know that i won’t mind that she teases me for it.
at my workplace, when i come up with the idea of making a recipe of my own,
the first flavor i make, and name after love,
is lavender.
and although everyone else there says it’s fine,
i still insist that i haven’t quite gotten the color right.

spearmint

for eight years (maybe longer; i can’t remember)
i’ve been buying myself the same soap,
over and over again.
an amount of times i can’t recall, when i was a teenager,
i was told by my mother that i smelled terrible,
and it’s something i obsessed over.
i open windows when weather is nice,
and buy room fresheners, and candles
(both because candles smell nice and some other reason)
and keep a bar of scented soap in my closet
and shower every time i wonder, even for a moment,
if i smell weird.
my favorite smell is spearmint.
i dread the day that the company i buy my soap from
stops making it; i think, perhaps, i’ll simply cease to exist if it happens.
i like the smell of spearmint.
and besides, it’s supposedly good for stress relief.
my girlfriend, whose favorite smell is lavender,
a detail i cling to and can more readily remember
than my childhood home’s address,
tells me when she hugs me, the first person i can recall ever doing so,
“hm. you smell nice!”
her mother buys me a candle with that scent for my birthday.

herb garden

my brother and i ate chives,
pulling them up from the planter box and putting them between our teeth
‘like cowboys’.
we knew they used grass, hay,
but we thought that was rather silly.
we preferred chives—
they tasted better.
until i was eight years old,
i had difficulty with certain words.
certain things existed parallel in my mind;
interchangeable.
the two things, growing adjacent in the planter boxes,
bitten down on as we played outside when weather was nice,
were onion and mint.
spearmint and variations are a brutal species.
they choke out any plant near them,
roots diving deep into the soil
and killing off everything else.
at an indie market between street corners on cobblestone
i find a tea supposedly helping with stress relief;
allowing for better sleep.
i wake often a dozen times per night,
terror chasing me awake, and i have already decided to buy the tea
before i even open it, holding it up to my nose.
it does, indeed, bring me an immediate wave of calm.
it smells like lavender.