The smell of oranges and roses never ceases to set me back into those years in which I thought I knew happiness.

The two together are strange: their scents mingle and twist and frolic in a dance of the beautiful and the divine that I cannot find anywhere else. They weave around each other like daisy chains, flow in and out like calm streams, turn and twist and braid like the hair of a pretty girl I knew once upon a dream.

She smelled like daydreams, a combination of citrus and floral aches, perfume that was always applied perfectly but never overdone. Her skin gave off an aura of hope and promises and love that lasts a lifetime, but it tasted like regret. This I have found to be the truest truth. The sweeter something is on the surface, the darker it is inside.

And how dark she was. How dark we were. How we fought like mad dogs and scratched and clawed and frothed and bit in order to assert our dominance, how the darkness inside of us could only be quelled by complete submission but how we could never really submit, how the demons within us loved to control that which we couldn’t quite reach, how her eyes would blaze and her mouth would set and how much it would turn me on, how I could never win with her but how, at the same time, I could never lose… How much I hated her and loved her and wanted to watch her suffer but at the same time how I wanted to protect her from those who would dare to lay a hand on her. How insecure she was, how much she doubted him and later, of course, me and then how I came to doubt myself, and that fateful day in December when I said goodbye for the last time…

“If you want to go, go,” she says, with no emotion in her voice at all. But I can read her facial expression like a book.

“I don’t want to go! Damnit, do you want me to go?” I spit in frustration.

“Go if you want to go!”

“Don’t make me do this,” I say and that’s when I know she already has. She turns her back to me and shakes her head and I slam the wooden door so hard I can hear my heart breaking.

That, of course, was not the end of our twisted story. Goodbyes rarely are. Our dreams lived on in other people. When my wife flipped her hair, I only saw her, and later she would tell me the same, when she tangled her hands in the hair of her husband she could only smell and taste me, and that our love was stronger than time and petty fights.

But it wasn’t petty fights that ended us. It was anger, and rage, and the knowing that you are stronger than your weakest link. She was my weak link; she was the reason my chain snapped. She's my fatal flaw. She was the only girl who could make me feel like a sinful angel and a virtuous sinner in the same sentence, and she was the only girl who could make me love it. Love her.

Now when we meet at gatherings of mutual friends and our eyes connect briefly, just to see if there is the same spark there. So dysfunctional, so sick, so wrong, but at the same time so right, I find myself drawn to her by chance and coincidence and divine forces and I know that I can never get enough of her.

When we fuck, it’s like all of our problems just melt away. They don’t, of course, but to push them to the side for a while, to forget about our spouses in the next room, and to focus on the here and now and bite me and fuck me harder and take me and keep your fucking voice down and I can’t and I need you and I want you and fuck you and I love you’s… it makes it easier. I can pretend I’m not who I am, but rather I am who I want to be. Being with her, it’s like a drug. I need it more than I need security, stability, and family. I would throw away my life for just one more hit.

She makes me want to die and she makes me want to live.