Sweet scented night

[Webmaster 20]

Subject: Sweet scented night

Date: Sun, May 4, 1997 11:23 PM

From: LtHerel

 

 

 

   Walking home, Herel breathes in the intoxicating night air.  It is a glorious evening with patches of fog shrouding the night lights in mysterious texture.  She inhales deeply as she passes under a tree in full spring bloom.  It is too dark to see the blossoms, but its sweet fruity scent takes her away… to where?  Familiar, but unfamiliar.  The story of her life.  For seven years she has lived with this constant feeling of knowing, but not knowing:  She knows this tree:  It is an apple tree, and she

can tell by the scent of its blossoms.  But how does she know the scent?  No one ever pointed it out to her on a warm spring day.  ("Here, Teri, smell.  Isn’t it pretty?")  Or in an arboretum.  Or on a holodeck.  Yet she knows the tree is an apple by the scent of its blossoms at night.  Not only that, she knows exactly what the fruit will taste like in four months, plucked right from the tree, still warm from the sun:  Tangy sweet and crunchy, and best just a few days before it is ready for harvest,

when it gets just a little too sweet and looses some of that crunch.  She has long ago accepted this unsettling characteristic of who she is, but accepting it has never made the sensation less disturbing.  Her entire education had been like this.  Taking classes at the academy had been more like an adventure into her brain than an education.  What did she know?  At what point did it leave off and she’d have to start studying? Quantum Physics:  Intact.  Warp theory:  Intact.  Transporter theory:  None.

Language:  Basic Klingon and Romulan:  Intact.  Vulcan and Betazed:  None.  Basic biology:  Intact.  Advanced Biology:  None.  Facts, theories, formulas, abstract concepts constantly jumping to her conscious mind.  At first it was like an avalanche.  After a couple of years, it started to slow down, and later it turned into trickle.  And now seven years later she can walk under an apple tree and know it by the scent of its blossoms.

   This is who she is.  She does not even harbor the idea of it being any other way.  Like a warm hand pieced quilt on a cold winter night:  It doesn’t matter who stitched it, or when, or what the history each piece of cloth holds.  All that matters is that all stitched together it is pretty and it is warm.

   What will tomorrow bring?  Part of her is terrified, but yet a greater part has enough confidence to know that the results will not matter.  

   The cool spring breeze ruffles her hair.  The lights from the rooms across the grounds shine into the fog.  She bends and breaks off a small blossom-laden twig from the apple and absently runs the flowers across her cheek as she walks across the wet grass.