Lovers Lane 50ml

For many, the phrase "lovers lane" elicits a smirk. It calls to mind fogged windows, poor judgment, and embarrassing memories best left behind in high school.
Perhaps the most storied of these places is Mulholland Drive. The twenty-one-mile road along California's Santa Monica Mountains was created by developers with plans to sell the surrounding land. They built the turnouts along the road so buyers could stop and take in what their money could reach: Los Angeles on one side, the San Fernando Valley on the other. The plan worked, and the lots all sold. But in the hundred years that followed, people continued to pull off at those overlooks for the view, or perhaps just to spend some quiet time together.

These were the places where people fell in love for the first time. Places of long, circling conversations, where two people said out loud what they had never said to anyone else, and where the whole of their attention narrowed to each other, and to an hour neither of them would have traded for anything.

Of course, the love affairs that blossomed at those overlooks rarely lasted. Neither do roses, and we love them just the same. Permanence was never the point. Those precious hours were for feeling something enormous without irony, without a strategy, and without the instinct for self-protection that develops soon enough. To feel that much, and to survive the heartache that follows, is one of the finer things a person gets to do in a life.