As many of you know, Spring and Summer…and Fall and Winter, to be honest, of 2004, were particularly harrowing seasons for me. Everything I’d ever wanted was gone. Like, I know you shouldn’t spend all your youth as a girl, hoping to be married. But I did. And then I was! Married, that is.

And then, I wasn’t. And I was faced with The Future, whatever that meant. So I behaved in the obvious way, and spent an inordinate amount of (credit card) money on H&M travesty dresses I’d never wear unironically, and on Jessica Simpson’s Dessert lip glosses…

…and on perfume. In retrospect, I think I hoped that if I just found the right scent, I’d once again be desirable as a woman. After all, I found Tommy Girl in my late 20s. Perhaps I could find scental rebirth in the dawn of my almost-30s!

So I played around. As with the leopard-print dresses and Juicy gloss (though to be fair? Juicy lip gloss was AWESOME! I’d pay 27 dollars for it again (right after my rent)), my seeking of scents fittingly reeked of desperation.

Did I buy JLo’s Glo? Yes I did. 15 years after Love’s Baby Soft Fail, I still convinced myself that one scent could make a man love me.

And then I made the ultimate purchase: Demeter’s…Something. Obviously, it didn’t work romantically, or I’d remember the specific fragrance. So I can’t recall the name, but I do remember the smell. It smelled like potential. Like summer mornings when I was 12, like Hick’s greenhouse when I was…whatever age. Didn’t matter. What mattered was that greenhouses smelled like heaven on Earth, and I had the Demeter fragrance to be that heaven, if only someone would appreciate me!

Well that didn’t work out. If I were to smell that mystery Demeter fragrance in 2012, it would likely speed me back to That Time. That time when my goals, and by extension, my being, were shattered. When I was so young and so dumb as to think that maybe everything would work out as I had hoped, even after everything.

Eight years and lots of (enjoyable!) single living later (Saturday night “Fresh Prince” marathons ftw!), I woke up this morning, the morning that I turned 37. Within a new, beautiful purse, among other amazing, thoughtful gifts from my boyfriend, was a new Demeter fragrance: Rain.

My favorite scent of all time. From my favorite person of all time. If only I had a time machine to reassure my past self…but maybe, that’s kind of the whole point. And isn’t it ironic?