a balmy night sky darkness over the water

Dulce de Cuerpo smells like the night sky over water, which sounds like nothing but is actually everything, a balmy darkness that has cooled just enough, where you find yourself tilting your head back and registering, not for the first time and not without a small interior lurch, how vast and indifferent all of it is. There's something agave-bright and boozy in here, a kind of milky agave-adjacent liqueur that has a celebrity's name attached to it, something that comes in a bottle shaped like a ruffled stiletto or a lacy skull, that you wouldn't seek out but that works perfectly in this moment because this whole moment is a little outside your life. You walked past the lurid neon dregs of a party a half mile down the beach to get here. You're wearing a sample of a fragrance you wouldn't normally reach for. The drink in your hand was whatever they were featuring at the bar. None of it is quite yours, and all of it is exactly right, somehow, for this time and space, a little bit outside time and space. Underneath, the fragrance is vanilla and resin and something softly earthy and powdery, but it's all filtered through the mist of the night tide, through salt and dark water and the musk of warm air that has been swirling over the ocean. Thoughts arrive and pass by like clouds over the moon. The sky, enormous. You, small and warm and human, all of your human grievances and desires and sadness and mania and wonder, which is fine, which is everything, which is all there is. Which is all you get.