BLACK ROSE

Olfactory memory

The girl on the train

I was on the train that was taking me home from a business trip and I saw a girl with beautiful black hair and emerald green eyes arrive, she sat in the seat opposite mine and gave me a smile.

After a while I found the courage to ask her where she was going, in Florence, she said to me, “I’m an architecture student and I’m back to give my degree thesis”. From that moment we talked for the whole trip and we immediately knew we had a strong empathy. There are many encounters when traveling and you never pay too much attention to the people you find on your path, but it happens, rarely to find someone interesting, that time I found the squad.

Once in Florence, like a good knight I helped her with the suitcases and she gave me a kiss on the cheek to thank me, then said “let’s hope to see you again” and I saw her slowly go away. Hell, I thought, I won’t turn my back on fate. I got off the train and ran after her, I called her and asked her phone number, the train was about to leave, I still remember her smile and her green eyes as she told me the number. Back on the train, I wrote the number on the page of a fashion magazine that someone had left on the seat next to mine. I still remember it because there was an advertisement for a perfume and an image of a cascade of flowers with a sample attached, the kind you find in magazines and you have to lift the metal tab to hear them. After a few days I tried to call her, but the number was non-existent, did I write it wrong? had he given me a made-up number? I’ll never know.

I searched for her for months trying to remember the words she said to me in that brief moment, the university she attended, the house in Positano where she spent the summers with her family.

I never saw her again, I was left with only the memory of that newspaper page that had the scent of a rose, cold, metallic, but also with sweet notes, like those hours spent with her.