corner   smell

Today would have been Ellie’s birthday. I still miss her terribly. Once or twice when out I’ve seen someone out of the corner of my eye that looks a little like her for a second and my breath catches and I have to hold onto myself so hard to stop myself shattering again in public as reality catches up to the foolish impressions that the pattern-matching part of my mind has latched onto before I can stop it.

There will forever only be a finite number of stories that I can share about her, an agonising thing to have to accept, and I want to share one of the stories that I have today. It’s silly, inconsequential, and doesn’t go anywhere, but it I hold it in my heart. It’s not even really a story, it’s just an image that I got strangely emotional about while drunk and latched onto:

I send it to Ellie declaring the little pudu fawn to be “literally me”. Ellie had previously send other pictures of pudu fauns and compared them to me. I think in this photo that there is something about the delicate timidness of deer generally with its stumpy little proportions contrasting with its earnest investigation of an unremarkable space puts me in mind of myself and perhaps my selfconsciousness around sharing hyperfixations. And something about the inane caption and double space gives it that energy of a strange, animal thought process that I really love, as if it was made for the understanding of a deer rather than a human. That is far more thought than I was giving the picture at the time, though, I was just drunk and tearing up over a picture of a small deer and sending it to Ellie, who wholeheartedly agreed that this was me and “corner   smell” became a phrase of deep affection in our shared vocabulary.

Also looking back over our chat history the next messages she sent me were about how she got a fancy coffee and then nearly slipped and dropped it but managed to keep her balance, then got home, went upstairs and immediately slipped again and spilled the coffee everywhere, which she said was worse than 10 9/11s.