Your bedside table is a stack of books with a lamp on it. You wear your grandfather’s wristwatch. You are impeccably well-read and you smell like it, because you are wearing D.S. & Durga’s Coriander perfume.
The muse for D.S. & Durga’s Coriander was a Chekhov short story about the Odessa seacoast, according to the scent’s creator, David Moltz. You already knew this, the very second you sprayed the perfume on your wrists, because you have never missed a literary reference, not once.
You wear Coriander and remember that you are still absolutely distressed that Odessa has been forsaken after the global decline of maritime transport. You frequently put down your out-of-print novel to gaze out the window and think: Odessa.
Coriander smells like the inside of a spice-trading ship sailing in “the 19th century, in the beautiful maritime Black Sea,” packed with only cool spices like sage and clary and pine, says Moltz. You also knew this, too, because as a literary woman, you are drawn to the transportive. You are allusive and elusive and you know the difference.
You are always lost in thought. You think about all sorts of things, like whether negative capability is a hoax and how heartbreak is a spondee. You are never seen reading the beginning of a novel. You are always a respectable length into it, so it bends elegantly on your lap.
When you wear Coriander, you feel very discerning, which of course you are. You wear it and warn your glamorous younger sister not to abdicate her vitality for promises of a safe future. You are very good at chess, but it bores you, because rigid monarchies are passé.
After you complete a book, you keep your bookmark in it, so that each is particular to the book. Most of your bookmarks are train tickets, some are sprigs of rosemary, some are notes from people who are in love with you. All of them smell of Coriander.